Stop the Madness! Fix your naming issues first.

A folder for each movie does make a number of things easier:

• support files can be put in one folder instead of named along with the filename (somemovie.mkv has a movie.nfo instead of somemovie.nfo)
• additional support files are possible (those that can't be built by filename like extrathumbs, extrafanart, etc. supported by different skins)
  

Thanks for this great post. You will surely help a lot of people here.

thanks again,

It would be nice if XBMC programmers would allow & and , in names. It seems titles with test are not liiked by XBMC and I need to remove the , and rename place & with and.

likelinus Wrote:Why do the movies need to be in individual folders? I'm just curious what the reason behind this is and I've never seen an explanation for it. Sounds like just one more click to make when looking for a movie.

My WHS server is setup with a video folder and then the videos inside a single folder. They are named the "movie name.extension". I only have Children's movies separated into a different folder so the kids can easily find them. This worked great on my WDTV Live Plus and was never an issue.

I installed XBMC on my Core Quad laptop this weekend as a test environment and the library and folder view modes worked perfectly. I didn't have any issues with the scraper, other than a few movies having original thumbs/posters instead of being the remake version (which adding the year or just selecting the movie myself fixed). Maybe it’s because none of my movies are split? Either way, it appears to work and didn't seem to be an issue. Is there something I'm missing on why this is important?

There are multiple reasons:

• If you have a movie split across multiple files, this keeps them together.
• The folder name describes the movie name/year and nothing else for scraping purposes. The movie file inside the folder can contain more info in the name to describe the source and quality of the file (ie. Movie.Name.(2010).1080p.DTS.BluRay.mkv) without effecting scraping.
• Allows for Video_TS subfolders.
• Additional files such as .nfo and subtitle files can be grouped together with movie files. NFO files with IMDB links can also make scraping more accurate this way as well.
  

likelinus Wrote:what I need to find is if there is a sports and news add-on! Like Weather has it's own tab/page, have another one for Sports (Scores/News) and News (Headlines)!

You can do RSS feeds, but this is an excellent idea. You could also create a custom menu item to point to a smart playlist or a video addon for news/sports for now though.

Randall Lind Wrote:It would be nice if XBMC programmers would allow & and , in names. It seems titles with test are not liiked by XBMC and I need to remove the , and rename place & with and.

I have a lot of movies that use both the "&" and "," in the titles, don't normally have issues with them scraping. Only time I have seen it to be an issue is when the scraped database and the DVD's titles differ. Maybe I have just been lucky, don't know.

The scrape fine in ember etc but don't show up for me in xbmc under movies or TV Shows until I remove the , and replace & with and.

compcentral Wrote:You can do RSS feeds, but this is an excellent idea. You could also create a custom menu item to point to a smart playlist or a video addon for news/sports for now though.

I would do it in a second if I was a programmer or knew what the heck I was doing

What I want is a Sports main tab/page that then shows a list of sports (i.e. NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL) on the right side and then upon selection it shows the scores on the left side with the team logos, name, score, quarter/period/inning/whatever). That would be awesome.

Then have a news tab/page that shows the top headlines from CNN, Google or someone like that. Maybe a list of a couple of providers.

Yeah, if someone could make that happen, that would be great!

I received a PM telling me that the "House" example I used was wrong. I think this is something that should be shared and answered here, so without author's name it reads:

Quote:Dr. House MD is actually named House MD NOT House... most scrapers will autocorrect this, but you might want to use a different example before some smartass points it out

To answer this, and not to be the smartass, the shows name is House with a show Id of 73255. There are 2 other english listings for this show. They are House MD and House M.D., but they each have the same show Id of 73255. If you go to that Id, you get a show called "House".

I retested thetvdb.com scraper with each name, and I delete my database before each test. Here are my results. When I auto scrape House I get it every time. When I tested both House MD and House M.D., I got zero on scrape and zero with auto update at start up. I tried a manual refresh on each and both required that I remove the MD or M.D. for it to scrape.

This brings me back to my point, you need to know what the actual name of the show that is in thetvdb.com.

No need to PM me about something that should be shared. I won't say that my way is perfect, but I will say that everthing that I have written, is the way I do it myself, and it works for me. If you get different results, post up here and let me know.

I go a few levels deeper:

Video > Movies > Genre (Action, Animation, Comedy, etc) > Title > Video_TS
Video > TV > Genre (Action, Animation, Comedy, etc)> Title > Video_TS
Music > FLAC > Genre (Blues, Dance, Indie, Folk, etc)> Artist > Album

This makes things more logical and easy to find when using Upnp devices and when in file list mode.

I also keep genres very simple and limit them to under ten.