* Official Kodi (née XBMC) Thread *

MeMeMeMe · 22 Oct 2013 at 07:14

xibinim said:
Is there an easy way to delete all the meta data created by Media Companion? Spent hours doing it yesterday. Not at home now; could I search for .nfo file types in my Films folder and delete all at once and then do the same with the other files/folders?

Create a text file called deletemetadata.bat, and copy this text into it:

Code:

@Echo off
for /R "D:\Movies" %%l in (*.nfo) do (
cd %%~dpl
rd /s /q .actors
del *.tbn
del *.jpg
del *.nfo
)
cd ..

Change the bit on the second line - where it says "D:\Movies", alter that to your media folder.
save the file, and double click it - it will delete all metadata files in that folder and all subfolders, and leave your movies, subtitle files and music files alone.

If you want to keep any artwork you've manually downloaded, remove the line: del *.jpg.

doodah · 22 Oct 2013 at 10:40

Thanks MeMeMeMe, that's very useful.

This is getting really annoying now. I have successfully scrapped my films with Ember and Media Companion, Ember was significantly more difficult. Trying all of them at once didn't work, I had to do it in small groups of films often with one failing and having to repeat several times for it to work. Furthermore Ember only did poster, fan art and nfo - it simply wouldn't do extra thumbnails and trailers. Any ideas why and how to resolve?

Both programs appeared to to get all of the art work right but as soon as I add to XBMC, I get this. I don't even have North by Northwest!!!!

BFCTom · 22 Oct 2013 at 10:46

What would be the easiest way to get into using XBMC on my TV?

A decent compromise between cost and performance would be what I'm after. I've been looking at some Android boxes on Amazon for around £70 - any good?

doodah · 22 Oct 2013 at 10:56

If you can still get one; an HP Microsever for £200 with £100 cash back, you would still need a £30 GFX card to do everything through HDMI. Otherwise a Raspberry Pi with a fast SD card and USB stick should do the trick.

BFCTom · 22 Oct 2013 at 11:45

Cheers for that. Looking for minimal setup time too, which I think wouldn't be the case with the Raspberry Pi? The Android boxes I've seen look ready to go.

liamcrane · 22 Oct 2013 at 12:18

Ember media manager has never let me down, find its much easier to control what metadata you want to see in xbmc rather than the built in options

doodah · 22 Oct 2013 at 12:21

That's what everyone keeps telling me. If you told it to scrape all your movies in one go, would it be able to do all or most? It is very tedious to have to do it in small batches and repeat many films just for it to scrape. I really can't figure out what I am doing wrong. Using 1.3X, don't change and settings, point it to my movies folder (structure = Movies\Skyfall (2012)\Skyfall (2013)). Can anyone tell me why it won't scrape all of the data either?

EDIT - Used Universal Scraper when importing films in XBMC last night, same problem just fewer instances.

bledd · 23 Oct 2013 at 13:29

This is how mine are arranged..

\\server\Movies (read only access)
Film1 (2001).mkv
File2 (1997).mkv

I don't bother putting them in folders.

Then I let XBMC use it's default scraper, but I change the settings for it so it looks at IMDB ratings, but gets the data from themoviedb.

If I have a film that doesn't scrape properly, then I manually search it on themoviedb, then rename the year / title of my file. (You find the odd film that may be reported as 2013 in some places and 2012 on others, I just go with what themoviedb says)

Confused · 23 Oct 2013 at 13:34

Mine is like this, and I just let XBMC do everything itself:

\\server\Videos\Movies\Film 1\Film 1.avi
\\server\Videos\Movies\Film 2\Film 2.avi

The odd one is set with a year, where there was another film with the same name but from a different year.

There's an option when you're configuring the Universal Movie Scraper for whether films are in separate folders or not.

As soon as I started using XBMC, I stopped using a 3rd-party app to deal with metadata, and once I got the filenames right (which most were), I've not had to do anything manually for any new films that are added.

MeMeMeMe · 23 Oct 2013 at 14:58

xibinim said:
Thanks MeMeMeMe, that's very useful.

This is getting really annoying now. I have successfully scrapped my films with Ember and Media Companion, Ember was significantly more difficult. Trying all of them at once didn't work, I had to do it in small groups of films often with one failing and having to repeat several times for it to work. Furthermore Ember only did poster, fan art and nfo - it simply wouldn't do extra thumbnails and trailers. Any ideas why and how to resolve?

Both programs appeared to to get all of the art work right but as soon as I add to XBMC, I get this. I don't even have North by Northwest!!!!

That's very weird. It may be a temporary problem with the site your xbmc scraper uses for artwork downloads.

In xbmc addons, go to movie information, and install the scraper to universal movie downloader.

then in xbmc videos section, go to your movie source: change the source type from Moves, to None (nbear with me), and click okay - it will ask if you want to erase existing data, click yes.
Then go back in and change back to movies, and select the universal movie scraper. Click okay and let it rescan your movies.

Hopefully this will fix your issue.

MeMeMeMe · 23 Oct 2013 at 15:03

Confused said:
Mine is like this, and I just let XBMC do everything itself:

\\server\Videos\Movies\Film 1\Film 1.avi
\\server\Videos\Movies\Film 2\Film 2.avi

The odd one is set with a year, where there was another film with the same name but from a different year.

There's an option when you're configuring the Universal Movie Scraper for whether films are in separate folders or not.

As soon as I started using XBMC, I stopped using a 3rd-party app to deal with metadata, and once I got the filenames right (which most were), I've not had to do anything manually for any new films that are added.

Mine is like this, and I always have the date in the movie name and folder.

\\server\Movies\Film 1 (year)\Film 1 (year).avi
I might have subtitle files in there with some of them named
\\server\Movies\Film 1 (year)\Film 1 (year).srt

I used to use Ember but found the nfo files it created were too verbose, and hardlinked some images (especially actor images) to offlink sites, so even though I had media on my hard drive that had been scraped by ember, it wasn't always using them. (I wonder if this could be the source of the North by Northwest image issue above.)

Once I started using xbmc's native scrapers (especially the universal movie scraper), I dumped ember and never looked back. I deleted all traces of metadata and let xbmc build it up again.

Then I exported the library from xbmc so that it recreated nfo and image files in the movie folders, to save time if I ever needed to start from scratch again.

xbmc does a really good job of scraping, once you have names set up.

doodah · 23 Oct 2013 at 15:04

Thanks for the help guys, will have another try tonight.

Should I remove the years then?
Leave them in their individual folders?
What's the best way to get trailers working?

FerretBoy · 23 Oct 2013 at 15:40

This is just it, xbmc has always scraped really well for me with movies->name (year)->name.ext. Only ever had issues when I tried to pass it nfo files, better to let it do its magic.

Confused · 23 Oct 2013 at 16:04

If you've got the right years in the titles, it won't hurt.

I think that individual folders is better, especially when browsing in Explorer in Windows (it won't then try to create thumbnails for every single video file when you're browsing)

doodah · 23 Oct 2013 at 16:20

Could that be it then? All of them have nfo files.

Confused · 23 Oct 2013 at 16:29

If there's an NFO file present, XBMC will use the data from that, and not look out on the internet at its scraper.

Therefore - if the NFO is wrong (due to using one of these other programs) - XBMC won't display the right stuff.

I went for XBMC because it coped with doing stuff itself much better than other apps I have used (such as MediaBrowser) - I don't see the point in adding in another manual step of scraping all the data when XBMC does it well enough itself

doodah · 23 Oct 2013 at 16:42

Right I will remove all of the data and start again though the last time I did this, XBMC came back with blank films (posters) but I think this was due to a common problem with its scrapers.

But.......if the third party apps are getting it right (poster, meta data, fan art) why would XBMC get it wrong when it pulls info from the nfo files?

doodah · 23 Oct 2013 at 18:48

Progress. I removed all of the data and got universal movie scraper to do all of the work. All films bar one have scrapped correctly. V for Vendetta shows some mangled screenshot from the film as the poster, tried scraping with 3rd party and updating but no luck. How can I change it manually so that XBMC picks it up correctly?

FerretBoy · 23 Oct 2013 at 22:23

In xbmc you can go to the films info and select new art.

doodah · 23 Oct 2013 at 22:49

Cool, figured how to change things manually. Everything it pretty much set now except successfully scraping and organising David Attenborough documentaries. Having a play with Yatse now. Thanks for all your help

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