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It'd be useful to have a smart playlist or something which would be an up-to-date list of all media files that are in your media sources that don't appear in your media library (due to their naming pattern not matching the regexes or whatever).
Otherwise, when you have a big collection, it's left to guesswork.
I'm going to write a python script to do this this evening, but simply by using a library XML export. If I have enough time, I'll read up about the python plugin API this weekend and try to code something that's a little more integrated, but I doubt I'll get around to it. Plus, in all fairness, I think this should definitely be core support.
Cheers
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2011-11-15, 04:08
(This post was last modified: 2011-11-15, 06:49 by timdog82001.)
There is already a script that does this, called the "Missing Movies Plugin" or something like that. I *think* it's available in the official repo. Last I knew, it worked poorly/not at all with files located on the network, but this may have changed.
HOWEVER, it does seem to me like a feature that would make sense to be included as part of XBMC, if not as part of xbmc core, then as an officially maintained add-on that ships with xbmc. If this were the case, it could not only help out the power user with his or her monster library, but also potentially facilitate things for newbs or those slightly less tech-savy.
Here's an idea of how it could be very useful, IMO:
Perhaps said script could run in the background automatically every time you complete scanning a new video source, and check to see how many videos it couldn't successfully identify. If this number is high enough, then a dialog would pop up telling you that a concerning number of videos could not be properly identified by XBMC, and would you like to view these files?
It here could also display a list of basic rules to follow for renaming or reorganizing these files to facilitate proper identification of the video file. This would primarily be useful for people who otherwise would not know what steps to take from here without digging through the wiki or the forums which, for the average user, is not something they are accustomed to doing. e.g., they could suggest adding the movie year in parenthesis, double check the show name/spelling on themoviedb.org or thetvdb.com (or other url that corresponds with your scraper of choice), checking episode numbering schemes, choosing an appropriate scraper, and so on.
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2011-12-15, 02:43
(This post was last modified: 2011-12-15, 15:02 by Woolly.)
Indeed, I'm surprised this functionality isn't in the core by standard! I am one of those people who can't be bothered to manually update and check their collection. I want to automate everything about the process as much as possible. My movie collection is a bit of a mess, but at least every movie has his own folder (I use the 'use folder name' option). If one of the movies is not recognized due to obscurity or regex mismatch by the scraper because of bad filenames, it won't even alarm me. So I cannot look into it to apply a quick fix (renaming the folder or provide an .nfo file).
There is probably a dozen files or so in my collection that are not recognized for some reason. It would be a shame to have a 20 GB movie file stashed away somewhere and not being able to know about it!
So I definitely think this should be included for Eden as a built-in option. As an extension, being able to set a priority of scrapers for every folder would complete this. That way if one of them fails, it tries the next one. That way you could even prioritise a scraper with low content coverage (say in a foreign language) and let all the missing scrapes be caught by the English scraper. This automates it further, because you don't have to customise the scraper for each movie.
But what am I thinking? The developers must have thought about this already. Maybe it's still hard to do for some reason? Any thoughts??
I guess this will all be built into the core some day. Hopefully in the next release. In the meantime, it's a shame that that the 'Missing movies plugin' does not work on network shares. But this seems basic functionality; why is it so hard to do? It's in my opinion just a matter of:
if there is a scrape failure for a video file, then:
display the file as an entry anyway with the title of the movie the same as the video file name.
An alternative is to display these missing movies in another screen.
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It's totally possible to get the plugin to work on the network. The original coder of the plugin just misunderstood some things. Anyway, if you found the thread for the addon, look through the last few pages of the thread. You'll see that somebody came along who is working on their own version of the addon now that should work with network shares. However, it only works with xbmc dharma v10.1. This person did say that they will update it to work with Eden when it comes out, though.
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I have the us pilot for "the it crowd".
It is named such that XBMC finds info for it online, and downloads artwork, and text info.
I can browse it and play it via "files", and while I can browse it in library mode, there does not seem to be a file associated with the info etc. to playback.
quite strange.
