Why does XBMC Individual Export .nfo Has hardly any information?
#1
Question 
I have been using XBMC for years now, and love it. It is THE best front end out there for a media PC period.

That said, I purchase new hard drives, and have a tendency to move things around the drives from time to time. Also restoring a PC from an image ect. In doing this, I do not want to have to build a movie of 3,000 movies every time from scratch. Therefore I export my movies to individual files. This way there is no corrupt database, and it does not matter what drives have what letters when I restore a system, or add a drive.

I have found that the information that XBMC exports is very limited, in comparison to media managers, such as Ember Media Manager. XBMC seems to have the information, as when I view a movie in the Transparancy! skin, it all shows up. However when I export, and open an .nfo file, there is very little information in there. Other than title, actors, links to thumbnails, and a couple other things. The video format, ratio, codec, audio, and many other items are left out.

Here is an example for the movie iRobot. I have not included the actors or thumbnail links, as XBMC and ember BOTH export that data.

Here is the Ember .nfo export, that has everything needed:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<movie xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<id>tt0343818</id>
<title>I, Robot</title>
<originaltitle>I, Robot</originaltitle>
<year>2004</year>
<releasedate>7/16/2004</releasedate>
<country>USA</country>
<country>Germany</country>
<rating>7</rating>
<votes>203,316</votes>
<mpaa>Rated PG-13 for intense stylized action, and some brief partial nudity (Approved No. 40784)</mpaa>
<certification>USATongueG-13</certification>
<genre>Action</genre>
<genre>Mystery</genre>
<genre>Sci-Fi</genre>
<studio>Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation</studio>
<director>Alex Proyas</director>
<credits>Jeff Vintar</credits>
<credits>Akiva Goldsman</credits>
<tagline>What will you do with yours?</tagline>
<outline>In the year 2035 a techno-phobic cop investigates a crime that may have been perpetrated by a robot, which leads to a larger threat to humanity.</outline>
<plot>Set in a future Earth (2035 A.D.) where robots are common assistants and workers for their human owners, this is the story of "robotophobic" Chicago Police Detective Del Spooner's investigation into the murder of Dr. Alfred Lanning, who works at U.S. Robotics, in which a robot, Sonny , appears to be implicated, even though that would mean the robot had violated the Three Laws of Robotics, which is apparently impossible. It seems impossible because.. if robots can break those laws, there's nothing to stop them from taking over the world, as humans have grown to become completely dependent upon their robots. Or maybe... they already have? Aiding Spooner in his investigation is a psychologist, Dr. Susan Calvin, who specializes in the psyches of robots.</plot>
<runtime>114</runtime>
<streamdetails>
<audio>
<channels>2</channels>
<codec>aac</codec>
<language>eng</language>
<longlanguage>English</longlanguage>
</audio>
<video>
<aspect>2.353</aspect>
<codec>avc1</codec>
<durationinseconds>6883</durationinseconds>
<height>544</height>
<scantype>Progressive</scantype>
<width>1280</width>
</video>
</streamdetails>
</fileinfo>



And here is the more limited XBMC export:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<movie>
<title>I, Robot</title>
<originaltitle>I, Robot</originaltitle>
<rating>8.100000</rating>
<epbookmark>0.000000</epbookmark>
<year>2004</year>
<top250>0</top250>
<votes>59</votes>
<outline></outline>
<plot>In the year 2035, where robots are common and abide by the three laws of robotics, a techno-phobic cop investigates an apparent suicide. Suspecting that a robot may be responsible for the death, his investigation leads him to believe that humanity may be in danger.</plot>
<tagline>Laws are made to be broken.</tagline>
<runtime>115</runtime>
<mpaa>Rated PG-13</mpaa>
<playcount>0</playcount>
<lastplayed>1601-01-01</lastplayed>
<id>tt0343818</id>
<genre>Action</genre>
<genre>Adventure</genre>
<genre>Drama</genre>
<genre>Science Fiction</genre>
<genre>Thriller</genre>
<country>United States of America</country>
<set></set>
<credits>Jeff Vintar</credits>
<credits>Akiva Goldsman</credits>
<credits>Isaac Asimov</credits>
<director>Alex Proyas</director>
<premiered>1601-01-01</premiered>
<status></status>
<code></code>
<aired>1601-01-01</aired>
<studio>20th Century Fox</studio>
<trailer>I Robot-trailer.mp4</trailer>


The main missing section being the audio and video information.

EDIT: GREAT! ! ! ! !

In a test, I just exported again, individual files, and told it to overwrite existing. It just wiped out all the extra information in my test directory of movies. None of them now have the ratio, resolution, codecs, audio channels ect ect.

I KNOW XBMC used that information from Ember when it imported, as if I turned off the setting in XBMC to get video info, and imported it would get the information from the ember created .nfo files, and the images for ratio, audio, and such would show in the Transparency! skin. If I then removed a movie, cleaned the library, edited out the video information from the .nfo, and then re-imported, all of that information would then be missing in the skin, and just have generic image place holders.

Here are a couple of screen shots showing what I am mean:

Here, With Ember Media Manager you can see the movie is 1080 resolution, 1.85 Aspect Ratio, H.264 Codec / compression and AAC audio:
Image


This is importing the movie with the <streamdetails> section edited out of the .nfo. (This is the way that all .nfo's are saved by XBMC, meaning all this information has to be scraped every time)
It is some sort of resolution, it has an unknown aspect ratio, unknown video compression, and who knows what kind of audio:
(Also note the orange cover background / case. This means it has no clue the resolution of the movie, where the above image shows a blue ray case)
Image





My question is, if XBMC uses this information, this information is available to skinners, then why is it not exported?
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#2
Pretty sure it's exported in current master as per a commit that just went in - try tonights nightly. It may not have been before (we can always re-generate it anyway).
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forum before posting.
Do not e-mail XBMC-Team members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules.
For troubleshooting and bug reporting please make sure you read this first.


Image
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#3
Yes making a smartplaylist based on aspect would seem difficult as a lot of the .nfo are missing this metadata.
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#4
I also have this problem. I have a download rig and I copy movies to my pendrive for transferring to HTPC later. The movie is scraped and the details are exported to the same movie folder. Then I will copy this to my htpc and xbmc will retrieve the saved info. Recently I installed Frodo beta3 and now the icons for resolution, audio codec, audio channel count etc. are missing. Older movies that I had before upgrading to Beta3 show these icons.
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Why does XBMC Individual Export .nfo Has hardly any information?0