Hi guys, I'm in the process of putting together a HTPC for my room, it will run XBMC. So my question is: When searching for information for the TV shows using TVDB, will it be able to correctly identify the information from shows downloaded with a Youtube downloader? I'm just not sure of it's capabilities and it would be nice to have the nice tiled effect with all the library info. So, a second opinion will be greatly appreciated. Cheers PS: I have no current experience with XBMC.
Provided the files are named correctly and XBMC is able to play that video format, it should go fine. Ideally the files should be sorted into directories too. Eg: >Dexter >Season 1 >Episode_name - S01E01 >Blah blah.... >Season 2 > S02E01-02 Important thing is the Season and Episode numbering. The rest not so. Including the year (2001) in the main show folder name helps in the case of remakes. Even without that, it's just a one time manual selection.
Naming of the episodes and folder structure is key to XBMC working correctly. There's a nice little tool that will do it for you www.therenamer.com
+1 However, if it still gets it slightly wrong (say, picks a movie up as the original rather than the re-make, for example) then you can go to the series/movie info and choose 'Refresh' which will let you select the correct option. The info pane also lets you select alternative artwork for posters/fanart etc.
Or append the year of release in the filename, I do this for any remake, As of a year ago, I tend to leave it in regardless.
I have to say, XBMC is a real cleaver bit of kit, as long as you follow a logical naming convention you should have no trouble. hint - tv/SeriesName/Season01/SeriesName.S01E20.mkv Movies/Moviename[2010]/MovieName.mkv I really recomend checking out the official XBMC remote app for android if you have a device. works over wifi like a charm. (even gets the gf aproval)
One thing that I've recently changed with XBMC is to scrape all the media info seperately, so when reinstalling or updating XBMC it doesn't have to rescrape every film. I didn;t find it a problem to begin with letting XBMC do it, but with over 200 films on there now it takes forever.
I found XBMC ok for videos, hopeless for music. But as people have pointed out films usually need the year in the file name for it to pick the right film.
To understand XBMC just install the windows version and play around with it and hit google very hard. as mentioned 'therenamer' is epic, aswell as Ember for films. I like to do all my scraping external to XBMC, its less stressful and once XBMC opens it see's everything perfectly. The only drawback i've had is blu-ray playback from disc, but its an annoyance not life or death.
Yeah, it took me bloody ages to find out how to launch powerdvd through XBMC so I could play blu ray rips - other than that it's a great bit of software
Actually, just let XBMC scrape the first time. Then go to the settings>video>export video library>individual files. It even keeps the watched/unwatched status.
you may want to check out ember media manager also to rip all the Metadata as well as it uses the exact same structure as XBMC In the end i got tired of keep ing XBMC updated however so just stick to Ember and explorer
