[DarkKnight1680]

Hi Everyone,

I recently did some organizing of videos on the Mac Mini connected to my bedroom TV. In doing so, I ended up making Aliases of a number of files so that I could have a movie both in the Genre and Actor categories without having to dual-store the files. The aliases show up fine in Finder, and play the play they are connected to if I open them. However, after adding the folders to XBMC, the aliases simply do not appear. Each folder they are in is there, but just appears empty.

Does anyone have a solution to get XMBC to recognize OSX aliases as legit video files to reference?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

[wgstarks]

Maybe symbolic links instead of aliases? This is just a guess on my part. I've never tried it.

[Martijn]

why don't you use playlists or smartplaylists?

[DarkKnight1680]

why don't you use playlists or smartplaylists?

I'm not familiar with that, I'll have to check it out. Will I need to redo all my filing work by creating playlists for each genre/actor/etc? I'd rather just find a way to have it recognize the aliases, if it means I can avoid doing all that work again.

[artrafael]

Why not just use the library? You can have Genre, Actor and other views automatically without having to make aliases or symbolic links of files manually.

[DarkKnight1680]

Why not just use the library? You can have Genre, Actor and other views automatically without having to make aliases or symbolic links of files manually.

I thought that only works if the data is scrape-able from some source. Most of the files aren't. And I already did the work, I just need to be able to use them

[artrafael]

So these movies were not released in theatres, on DVDs, etc.?

[DarkKnight1680]

So these movies were not released in theatres, on DVDs, etc.?

Correct.

[Glorious1]

Not sure what work you did to organize them, but presumably you made NFO files for them. All you need to do is put in Actor and Genre tags to be able to use those features of the library.

[DarkKnight1680]

Not sure what work you did to organize them, but presumably you made NFO files for them. All you need to do is put in Actor and Genre tags to be able to use those features of the library.

I didn't, I just built the folders I wanted, and anywhere that a file needed to exist twice I just created an alias and deposited it in the expected folder.

It seems from the responses that there is no way to make XBMC recognize/display the aliases currently. Is there somewhere I can go to put it in as a feature request?

[artrafael]

As Glorious1 suggested, you can create NFO_files (wiki) for each of your video files with actors and genres defined. This way, your videos can be scanned into the library. Once in the library, you can easily list them by actors or genre. You can even use smart playlists, as mentioned earlier by Martijn, to further customize how you want your videos selected/presented.

[Glorious1]

Yes, there is a feature request forum if you look at the forum organization. But I doubt developers are going to jump on this one, as there are other, more elegant ways to accomplish what you are trying to do. You could use a media manager to generate NFOs that would allow you to get a lot more out of XBMC, so your videos would be much like a commercial scraped dvd. Since you are on a mac, I would highly recommend ViMediaManager.

[artrafael]

It seems from the responses that there is no way to make XBMC recognize/display the aliases currently. Is there somewhere I can go to put it in as a feature request?

That's not an XBMC limitation; it's how aliases work with your OS. Try using symbolic links instead, as suggested by wgstarks above, and see if that works (I know they do in Linux). See here for differences between aliases and symbolic links: http://forums.macworld.com/index.php?/to...lic-links/

(NOTE: This is if you do not intend to use the library suggestion)