*** Official Kodi (née XBMC) Thread ***

Have you set the source/scraper accordingly on the folders in XBMC?

I'm assuming too that your media files have some form of sensible folder/file naming structure? :)
 
Anything that's there already, XBMC should use and store into its own database.

But for anything new, XBMC will just add the metadata to its database and download the images.
 
Depends on whether your file names are any good? If your filenames are sensible (ie the path & filename contains the artist, album, track number and track name) then you can easily convert the filename into tags.


If your filenames are as rubbish as your ID3 tags, then you're putting your entire collection at the mercy of a bit of software...

I used MusicBrainz a number of years ago, and it completely screwed up a vast majority of my music collection (stupidly, I didn't have a backup to restore from)

My advice is to spend an hour or so a day sorting it out manually - you should be able to get through quite a bit in an hour, and you'll make some good progress.
 
The initial setup took me a couple of hours, but since doing that, I've not had to touch it again.

I'm utilising the MySQL server I'm also using for my XBMC database, rather than using the MSSQL option (as I already had MySQL installed, I didn't see any point in adding additional overhead of another database service to the server), and am using the in-built web server.

The web interface is great, and works from PC, phone and tablet, and there's an Android app which also works really well.
 
I've "only" got it installed on my server, not my XBMC machine(s), however, I've never once found that any Argus-TV applications were open unless I'd explicitly opened them.
 
It'll depends on where your dish is pointing. No point in asking it to scan a sat at 19.2E if your dish is pointing at 28.2E (which is what's used for FreeSat)


If your dish is pointing elsewhere, then you'll need to select the setting that relates to your dish orientation.
 
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.
 
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)
 
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 :)
 
As Subliminal Aura says, unified, centralised library is the main advantage.

Also, if you're using lower powered clients, such as a Raspberry Pi, the relatively "heavy" database work is offloaded to another machine, leaving more processing power for the Pi to actually run XBMC, which can mean it runs quicker.
 
Not really :)

Once you've got it installed on a machine (use 5.5 and not 5.6), you just create the advancedsettings.xml file as described in the very first post of the thread - and that's pretty much it.
 
Probably the homegroup - I think it's just a pain in the backside (like most of these "auto-config" stuff, such as UPnP and DNLA!)

Do you have mapped drives, or are you accessing directly (ie smb://server/Movies)
 
Yeah, don't use mapped drives :)

I would also remove all HomeGroups too - it's another layer of complexity to the file sharing which you have very little control over.
 
You don't need to.

I, however, do have XBMC running on my server, because it's the only machine that's on 24/7, and therefore it deals with ensuring that the library is up to date - it gets notifications from Sickbeard/CouchPotato.
 
The best things ever - however, I don't think we're strictly allowed to talk about them here, so I don't want to say too much and get this thread locked/deleted.

Think of them as internet-based PVR applications.
 
If you're using the default skin, I think pressing Left will bring up the side menu, which will allow you to enable library mode.

I'm assuming that you've first pressed C and from the menu chosen "Set Content" on your video folders, to scan them into the library.
 
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