I received a couple of Popboxes on Friday and have a big issue with how the Popbox mistagged so many of my Movies and TV Shows. I have been able to work through many of my issues with the Popbox support team and thought I would share what I have discovered so far. I read through the 25 pages above and didn't see this info, so hopefully I am not posting stuff that was up there somewhere and I missed it. This info is probably pretty basic to those of you that have been streaming your media for years, but to those of you new to the game (like me) I hope this helps...
- I had mistakely not named my movie directories or files well enough that the Popbox could grab the info from IMDB. For many of my files, once I renamed the directory or file to be more detailed, the info was properly imported from IMDB. If you name your files or folders in such a way that searching IMDB using your filename results in it finding your movie on the top of the list, you should be good to go.
- You can force a rescan of your share by adding the share again. For example, if you already share "My Videos", don't delete it, just go back and re add the same share. It won't show up again in your list, but the Scan Status should change to Running. Many times I find I have to re add the share twice in a row to trigger the scan.
- According to Popbox tech support, the Popbox should automatically purge the old mistagged video, but I have not found this to be the case. Typically I end up with the new properly tagged video, and the old mistagged video. I will look into this more when I get home later.
- I still have a bunch of videos that aren't properly recognized even after renaming the files/folders. Now I haven't tried this yet, but Popbox support has responded to me and let me know that I can create an NFO file and it will use this NFO file to grab the proper info from IMDB. Here is the procedure they outlined in the e-mails.
- Open up notepad and enter the URL for the IMDB listing.
- Then save as filename.nfo and save it in the same directory as the video file (so if video file is Avatar.mkv, save the notepad as Avatar.nfo, then place it in the same folder as the video file)
- If this is in the format {MovieName}\\Video_TS, put the NFO in the {MovieName} directory, not the VIDEO_TS
- The NFO file has the higher priority and should be used to determine where to go in IMDB for the info.
- Categorizing TV shows gets a little uglier. Currently you can either use a single NFO for the entire series, which results in all of the episodes having the same info, or you can create an NFO for each episode. I plan on trying the latter this evening for one of my series and seeing how much more work that will end up being.
Finally, I have been interfacing with Popbox support via phone and e-mail since opening the box on Friday have not had any problems with them (as far as tech support goes). I have been impressed that someone has personally responded to my e-mailed questions over the weekend (two on Saturday and two on Sunday) and that they worked with me on the phone on Friday until my firmware issue was fixed. Even though I am sure their tech support is taking a beating this weekend, they took the time to personally respond to me with a simple custom created step-by-step guide on how to create these NFO files to see if it addressed my needs. I appreciate that.
Well, I hope some of this information is helpful, and please don't beat me up too bad since this is my first post!
