XBMC Media Center : Setup Guide, Knowlege Base & Support - Page 12

Almost there!
Created a smart playlist.
Added it to the main screen.

Only problem is ... none of my movies show up!

In the smart playlist I created the rule....
'path' 'is' ....location of movies

All the movies have been scanned by xbmc and show up when I click the regular movie button.

However in the 2 smartlists I created it takes me to a screen with nothing....
Any other rules or a different rule I need to make?

Could it be because each individual movie is a sub folder of the folder I pointed to?
If this is the case .... what would need changed?

deleted....accidental post

XBMC need to move away from these 2 things -

1. Separation of File view and Library view
2. Only 2 content types - Tv shows and Music

If you look at Plex Alexandria (XBMC port for OSX) - (http://elan.plexapp.com/2010/03/24/t...-introduction/), this is exactly what they did along with a host of other improvements that take care of the built-in vs 3rd party scraper issue too.

I don't see any of this mentioned in the XBMC roadmap and I don't know why they don' address this - maybe there is some sort of bad blood between the 2 camps or simply different philosophies. I know XBMC does not want to use the http-xml format used in Plex to retrieve data from the server.

I want multiple categories and sub-categories, each with their own fanart and metadata, independent of or based on folders. Right now there is no way to do this in XBMC besides some hacking with smartlists.

Ok... just added the newest Family Guy episode.
Had it update... it scraped it as next weeks episode... how do I tell it that it f'ed up?

Also, since I had to let xbmc scrape my tv show...all of my season cover art for all the tv shows is the same for each show.
Makes it kind of blah... Can something be done about this?


WOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOO ....problem in post #331 fixed.
made a couple modifications to my .xsp files as per the instructions found here....

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=89678

Smart playlist working perfectly!

I would advise having a look at XBMC Web Media Manager, this is a Addon to XBMC that allows you to use a web browser to launch a video/music database management tool that accesses the internal XBMC databases directly giving you the control over the metadata of a 3rd party app like MCM. I've not had a chance to have a with it myself yet but it looks good, see http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=60643 for more info.

Was the file named correctly?, I doubt it would scrape next weeks episode (it's not that intutive), unless it was named as such - please provide a screenshot of the folder.

To assist with the season thumbs issue could you also post a screenshot of your TV Show folder showing the file naming convention.

A quick resume of what you have actually done wouldn't go amiss either - did you delete all references to the MCM/WMC data prior to xbmc carrying out the scrape. Once you had scraped did you then carry out an library export to seperate files. Your information is sketchy at best.

Question about Music scraping. I had xbmc add everything to the Library. It's all there but a lot of the album info it not. If I bring up the context menu on an album and look at the album information and then hit refresh it brings down all the correct info, art, etc. How can I get XBMC to do this for all the music so I don't have to do this for each album??

Ok, got the episode issue resolved... due to a naming error on my part... a rarity I can assure you :-)

not really sure what you mean by deleting reverences to MCM/WMC
I did the library export to separate files.

Some of the series have different artwork for the different seasons and some don't....

here is a screen shot of tv shows.....

I tried following this awesome tutorial..

i'm having a few problems. I installed mcm and XBMC, I set up the scraper for my media HHD and it highlighted the files but didnt' retrieve anything... they were all highlighted in pink indicating no data available.

second problem is that i can't get XBMC to load my media library... made up of MKV primarily.

any ideas or things i need to tweak?

or should i just attempt mymovies or mediaportal?

thanks guys

If you check out about the last 20 posts.... I had no luck getting MCM to work properly... I ended up just letting XBMC scrape everything itself.

Have you:

1. Configured your Sources to point XBMC to where your media is stored?

2. Set the content type to either TV or Movies for each of your Sources?

3. Scanned your Sources to add content to the Library?

@LordHutt

Sorry should have made it clearer, drill down into one of the series that are giving you poster problems, basically I want to see what files are in the show/season folders (looking for 2 screenshots, 1 of inside the Show folder and another of inside the Season folder.

Previoulsy you said that you had scraped information for WMC using MCM, which had generated amongst other things .xml which were not compatible with XBMC and probably incorrectly named Poster/Fanart files. Have you left them in situ or did you delete all files previously scraped by MCM. There may be conflict if they are still there.

If you were going to carry out a complete internal XBMC scrape

Scroll across the picture in your broswer... I believe everything you need should be there. There are 3 explorer screens. I did not delete any of the MCM/WMC files. However some of the series are working correctly.... perhaps half or so have different artwork for the season covers.

LOL well that'll teach me to be more thorough.

As I said in a previous post, I had the exact problem you had moving across from WMC with MCM generated metadata. The only thing that allowed me a clean and accurate scrape was to start with surgically clean folders, that meant deleting everything except the video files (including the metadata and actors folder), then allowed XBMC to carry out a scrape.

I tried small samples in various combinations and XBMC just didn't like the existence of MCM generated metadata. I appreciate that this is a big step to take, but having decided to use XBMC, I took the decision that I wouldn't need alternative metadata fro WMC and deleted everything.

This is the only way you will get a correct and accurate scrape.

EDIT

If you decided to go down this avenue use the search facility in Explorer on the root to identify the necessary files by extension - xml, tbn, jpeg etc. This will allow mass deletion.

Ok... screw it, I'll give it a shot.
Wont take but 5-10 minutes to delete all the files and then walk away while it scrapes.
I'll post the results.

>>>>>>>>>Ok 8500 items deleted. (just doing tv shows since movies seems ok right now)
And it scraping......

That is what I did to clean the folders.

I tried MCM, and maybe because I am an impatient SOB, I did not like it.

The internal scraper in XBMC is good so far for me, plus most of my movies are in gender folders, and I really do not want to go through and create folders for each movie. (Yes I can run a script that will do it for me, but why bother)

3 of my TV's are using WD-Live, and it is a lot easier to go into gender folders I created than having folders for each movie. For some reason, when I use the WMC in junction with WD-Live, I have a hard time playing 1080P movies, when I use the netshare, no problems.

Now my question is, can you create your own Genders and apply them to movies?

Example, I have all the James Bond movies, and would make a Gender called 007, and set all the James Bond movies to 007 gender. Same thing for Disney

Also is there a way to manually change gender in XBMC? Some movies have completely wrong gender settings.

That's the real question. I have no answer for that.

As for the mymovies.xml, I think MCM generates one compatible with MediaBrowser, which My Movies will overwrite (and XBMC may not understand).

Check your movies as well - sure I had backdrop issues - basically they didn't show up, though the posters did.

Ok, just got back home.
Checked out all the tv stuff. Well, the season artwork is all better now....
However the cover artwork on the main screen when you are selecting your show is messed up!!!
Ummm...I don't know the exact dimensions of the covers so lets just say they are 300x800
..... now imagine you downloaded pictures for each show at 3000x8000 and instead of resizing to fit you just cut a piece out at 300x800.
That is what they are like ...as if a piece of of giant box was cut out. Some might of a giant letter or 2 or just part of someones head!!! Hope I described that clearly enough.
I don't really have time at the moment to play around with it... any thoughts...

Post us a screenshot - much easier to see what the problem may be.

I think you need to specify in the MCM settings to create the appropriate XBMC files. If it still isn't making them there is an option to have create the NFO files for all the media from one of the drop downs.

As you can see the artwork is a little fubar'ed....

i think i did that... i can point XBMC to to where the media is stored.. just the file.. or will it list all files?

its weird.. i have a ssd boot drive and i changed my main files to the main HHD.. the whole thing seems simple there is some detail somewhere that i missed. also in MCM it sees the files but doesn't scrape to a info file.

@LordHutt

Yeah strange - What skin are you using? Might be wrong, but it may be that xbmc has downloaded Banners instead of posters and this is what is being displayed.

Three suggestions to see if this is the issue - if not using already switch to the default Confluence skin and then to TV Show views - it is set to use banners as default. If your using another skin other than Confluence try changing the view to banner/Wide Icon (they're all named differently depending on skin designers preferences) and see if that resolves the issues.

in the current view highlight Family Guy - call up the context menu choose the option TV Show information and from there choose Get Thumb, pick any poster (not banner, you may have to scroll through the banners to get to the posters) and see whether that solves the issue.

EDIT

looks like you aren't the only person with this problem - see here http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=81601&page=134 post #1338.

Well, of course you do!


I think he's already past this point. (Personally, I tried MCM and do not use it.)

Try following the Quick Start Guide at http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title...ck_Start_Guide to see if that helps you out.

LOL - what about post #3 in this thread - it is after all the whole purpose of the thread.

Personally I don't think what GreenEyez has posted is as clear as that Quick Start Guide wiki page hence why I directed them to the wiki.

this is a great thread!

Wasn't getting at you personally mate, just that I questioned the need for the guide, given that there is already a dedicated forum, though somewhat fragmented I will admit.