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

FerretBoy said:
http://wiki.openelec.tv/index.php?title=Updating_OpenELEC
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Thanks - now I've read it properly it appears I need to do a manual update which would be fine except the instructions to open the folder to view the OpenElec IP address just opens up a webpage with "Remote", "Movies", "TV Shows" & "Music" rather than it opening up a Windows-Explorer type window with folders in!?!?!

Any idea what I'm doing wrong??

*edit*

Nevermind, managed to navigate to the update folder, put the 4 files in, rebooted and it seems to have worked!
 
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I can't help but wonder if I'm doing something wrong with XBMC.

Long story short: my MP build got all fouled up with skin/version conflicts and stopped playing TV series. After uninstalling-resinstalling a few times and getting fed up, I tried the latest Kodi build of XBMC.

This is my second time of trying XBMC as my HTPC front-end, and unfortunately it had me scampering back to MP after less than half a day for the same reason as before - poor metadata scraping and management.

I quite liked the look and feel of the interface in general, and it does have an abundance of plug-ins and extensions, BUT - again, it mis-scraped several TV series and dozens of films, and completely skipped over dozens more films. (I do have a large number of foreign films and some quite obscure, so that's probably why the scraper is struggling with them, and why I am having more problems than some other people.)

I looked into solutions to correct the scrapers, and found XVMM, which I got working after a bit of tinkering, but it seems that you need to make all metadata changes manually through that (and I couldn't see an easy way to change the incorrectly scraped artwork).

With MP, using the MP-TV Series and Moving Pictures (or My Films) add-ons, you can send films back to for re-scraping and select from different possible results, change the scraper and try again for films individually or in groups, easily alter the displayed artwork/cover. It's a doddle and I ended up with all of my 800 or so films correctly scraped with not too much extra work. In XBMC that would have taken me weeks or hard work from what I can see.

Am I doing something wrong? Missing something obvious? Or is this just something that for some reason is immeasurably easier in MP? I liked a lot about XBMC, but this was a complete deal-breaker for me.

(Oh, I did finally get MP working after figuring our that the Streamed MP skin I was using clashed with the latest kernel. All working now with PureVision HD skin.)
 
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If it gets the scrape wrong you hit menu key on film and refresh I think which searches again and you can then pick correct film from results which should then download correct data. It's same with TV series.
 
Okay. I just nipped into the other room to try this out, since I didn't uninstall XBMC from the lounge HTPC. I couldn't get it to work. The pressing the menu button when on a TV series or episode to get it to re-scrape, I mean (or the info button, or any other button, I tried them all!). I'm using a MS remote, but nothing happened.

I can bring up the library management options using the left/right buttons (i.e. sort order, filters, rescan, etc.), but nothing to send individual series back to the scraper(s).

Am I being dim and missing something obvious?

(And thanks for the info Vimes, but I did know about the naming conventions, and already have my files named in this manner anyway. It still misses or mis-scrapes a goodly percentage of my foreign films)
 
When using a remote I have always long pressed on the film to bring up the context menu to "refresh". This was from an Apple TV though so I don't know what your current keymappings are. Maybe just plug a mouse in for the meantime and simply right click on the film to get the correct context menu?
 
Right. Okay, yes, using the mouse to right click brought up the "Show Information" screen (which I think should be accessible using the "i" button but for some reason isn't for me). For here, the "refresh" option does indeed send the show back to the scraper and bring up options where more than one show matches. Nice. Thanks for the tip.

So all my TV shows are now sitting in XBMC correctly. But my films... gah, I guess this will be possible too it seems now I know the options, but I'm so far from having the film interface set up the way I want it and with correct metadata I'm giving up on it for now.

So it seems I may be able to get XBMC set up at some point. That's good to know and I may come back to it (perhaps the next time my MP installation fouls up). But I still have to say that for me the metadata management options in MP are still clearly more powerful and easier to configure and amend (well providing you don't mind using M&K with your HTPC set-up).

Good to have options though, so thanks for the pointers guys :)
 
I have all of my keys mapped to my MCE remote, to a certain extent, and so I don't always remember the correct keyboard key to use, but at least you have found that.

As you have noted it will be possible to apply that method with your films and once done you could then backup that data and so it could then be reimported if XBMC or the OS needs to be reinstalled etc.

The scraping of films, mainly, was a bit of a pain for me too when I moved over from MP, but I think that was more of me being familiar with MP and its plugins which, whilst worked to a certain degree, ran differently to that of XBMC.
 
For scraping from scratch I have always found it easier to use a 3rd party application like MediaCompanion to scrape the metadata first off. Since it is done from a PC it is a doddle to change incorrect scrapings. Once everything is 100% in MediaCompanion simply scrape in XBMC and bobs your auntie.
 
strumpusplunket, manually search your odd films on themoviedb in a browser, rename your files to match their entries on here.
 
bledd. said:
strumpusplunket, manually search your odd films on themoviedb in a browser, rename your files to match their entries on here.
Click to expand...

Ah yes, I notice now I look that I have a seemingly random mix of original foreign titles and English translations. Some of the dates in my filenames are wrong too (though actually I notice some of the dates on the moviedb are wrong as well, but never-mind that). I also spot some typos. All of this won't have helped with scraping, of course.

This might take some time, but it looks like the filenames could do with a tidy-up anyway.
 
Sometimes I have found that it is the year which causes the misnaming issue, as you have noted. I tend to leave that out of the title when possible.

I had not heard of mediacompanion before, I might check it out.
 
Actually that didn't take long to do over my lunch-break. Seems now that I might be ready to get a good XBMC set-up going. It is definitely faster and with more support and plug-ins than MP. Need to find a skin I like next (was a fan of the Streamed-MP skin for MP).

I also don't quite like the layout at the moment on the home screen of XBMC. On MP I have icons directly on the homescreen for Films (Moving Pictures), TV series, My Videos, Photos and Music.

On XBMC, my TV series icon is buried one layer deep inside the TV icon that's on the homescreen, and when I go into Movies, I have to navigate to source first before it lists the films. I presume it's customisable so I can have it laid out like my MP homescreen is? Or perhaps this varies from one skin to another?

Also, can I make the green button on my remote load up XBMC or switch focus to it like I can with MP (preferably without having to faff with LM remote keymap or something similar)?

(Sorry if I'm asking questions that have been answered upthread - it's a huuuge thread now!)
 
Remap TGB on your remote to the same keys that you assign to the XBMC shortcut.
I'm on my phone now and do can't find my bookmarks but there is a useful tool over at their forums to help you to remap your key strokes to your remote, if needed.

If you like the Confluence skin then use the modified version, you can amend and alter a lot of items for the home screen.

Look also for the XBMC launcher, two of them share similar names, the one I mean has start up and focus options etc for XBMC.
 
strumpusplunket said:
Actually that didn't take long to do over my lunch-break. Seems now that I might be ready to get a good XBMC set-up going. It is definitely faster and with more support and plug-ins than MP. Need to find a skin I like next (was a fan of the Streamed-MP skin for MP).

I also don't quite like the layout at the moment on the home screen of XBMC. On MP I have icons directly on the homescreen for Films (Moving Pictures), TV series, My Videos, Photos and Music.

On XBMC, my TV series icon is buried one layer deep inside the TV icon that's on the homescreen, and when I go into Movies, I have to navigate to source first before it lists the films. I presume it's customisable so I can have it laid out like my MP homescreen is? Or perhaps this varies from one skin to another?

Also, can I make the green button on my remote load up XBMC or switch focus to it like I can with MP (preferably without having to faff with LM remote keymap or something similar)?

(Sorry if I'm asking questions that have been answered upthread - it's a huuuge thread now!)
Click to expand...

You need to enable Library view. Libraries are the heart of XBMC.
 
ubern00b said:
Really scratching my head, I am stumped and perplexed. I got a new telly the other day and set it up. Connected it to my Microserver which has an nVidia GT610 in it and acts as my media centre.

On playing media I noticed the picture quality was quite bad. Jaggies everywhere, aliasing quite badly. Updated to the latest nVidia drivers but no change. Played around with decoding settings in XBMC, set DXVA on and off (so switched between software and hardware decoding) and still no change.

At this point I exit XBMC and fire up MPC-HC. Picture is perfect. Not a jagged edge in sight. MPC-HC is using LAV decoder and DXVA. So before I thought it was a driver issue, but now it's looking like an XBMC issue.

So, I create an OpenELEC 4.0.7 live USB stick and boot from that. Do the same tests with the same movies and everything is perfect, no jaggies in sight at all.

So this is where I am stumped. Seems to be an XBMC issue but only when running in Windows. I don't even know where to start troubleshooting this one! Bar a good old format and re-install and see if that fixes anything. Not a fan of that brute-force approach though.

Any ideas/things to try?
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To quote myself, I solved the problem. Makes absolutely no sense to me but I noticed I was on XBMC 13.1 so ugraded to 13.2 and boom, problem solved.

All I did was plug in a new telly, everything else stayed the same. At least it's working. 65" goodness! :D
 
Hi all, wonder if someone can advise me on something as I can't make head nor tail of any documentation on it.

I have a MCE (Media Centre Edition) remote and most buttons work fine on my XBMCBuntu 13.0 box, and more buttons work on my OpenElec (latest) box, however I don't know what I have to do to map the extra buttons.

IRW works on my openelec box and not on my xbmcbuntu box. I'm tempted to omit by xbmcbuntu box as it needs upgrading anyway but if anyone does know the answer I'd be very grateful
 
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