[zeech]

Hi, I'm trying to set up a media player PC for my computer-illiterate mother. I thought xbmc might present a friendly interface for her.
I've got a big harddrive full of unorganised movie files, in various folders. Many are in chinese, and many are handmade ISOs from DVDs/VCDs that I ripped for her.

Is there any way I can get xbmc to not scrape, just scan my drive for playable files and use the filenames as-is?

From the wiki and FAQ, and some google searching on these forums, it seems the answer is "no" ?
I'm hoping some sort of workaround or add-on can help me.

Due to the number of files, renaming, reorganising or manually adding isn't practical.
Neither is creating nfo files (unless there are programs that can do that automatically?)

----------------
When I downloaded xbmc, I was assuming it would work like most hardware media players:
- Point it at a harddrive full of media
- It will scan the harddrive recursively and look for playable files based on filename extension
- Display a list of playable media, showing its filename.

I don't need metadata or scraping, I'd just like to get my media imported with minimal fuss. Is that possible with xbmc?

Alternatively, does anyone know of any other media playing software that behaves like I describe? I looked at boxee but it doesnt seem to have good .iso support.

Thanks

[Haudrauf]

Hi zeech,
you can just use plain file view, but then you have to navigate into the folder.
Just have a look at scraping, maybe you can use a program like Ember (emm-r) where you can write nfo files to the folders from where xbmc is getting the relevant info.
For my video collection this is ideal, and you don't need so much time if you have to re-scrape your collection.

[bry]

There are plenty of utilities here that can help you. If you wanted to make it rasier for your mom and use xbmc you may want to use the system and features xbmc offers. I am not familiar with any of these utilities that work for Chinese media. You may want to look into some of the add-ons. I believe you can get live streaming tv.

[zeech]

Thanks for the replies. Can ember do something like what I want?

I looked at its webpage/setup guides and it just talks about scraping, filling out metadata from online sources and stuff.

Since most of the media I have are chinese things, I dont think they will be found online from the usual english sources. (To make it harder, I can't read chinese myself, so I can't even check if the scrape worked properly or not!)

If xmbc can't do it automatically, then as a last resort it would be good to have a tool that goes through all my media files and just generates some sort of blank/basic nfo file in the right location, based on the filename.

[bry]

Zeech - are these primarily tv and movies? you may want to look into this repo - http://code.google.com/p/xbmc-addons-chinese/

also check this thread - http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=64250

[Haudrauf]

Zeech,
with ember you are able just to copy your filenames into the field of the movie name and it writes the nfo-files.
Ember is more powerful, sure, but this way you can give your mother the comfort of xbmc without needing to learn reading chinese :-)

[zeech]

Hmm, Ember Media Manager crashes on startup and doesnt run for me. I'm seeking help in the ember thread.

I guess I might try to write a script that generates NFO files for me.

However, the XBMC help and wiki pages don't really go into good detail on how it should be formatted.

Can anyone please tell me what the absolute minimal NFO file would be? Can it be something as simple as:

<movie>
<title>Title taken from filename</title>
</movie>

?