[gabardal]

Hello, long time Kodi user here, I hope somebody can help me. I organize my movie collection in dvds, some in video dvd structure, and some containing ripped video files, and therefore are not included on my Kodi library. Just recently I discovered I could accomplish exactly this by using media stubs, include offline media to my library, and have Kodi prompt for the proper media only when needed (pretty cool). My question is: is there a tool/script/gui to simplify or automate the process of creating these stub files from my dvds? I realize its a simple process if you have a few files, but we are talking about at least 200 dvds containing data here. I've been searching the forums and toying around with, for instance, media companion, but it doesnt seem to be what Im looking for.
Has anyone been succesfull on such task? Would you care to share?
Thanks in advance, cheers...

[myron]

tinyMediaManager has a button to create such offline stubs.(see http://www.tinymediamanager.org/blog/offline-movies/ )
Simple form to add title and location where to store.
(and the benefit to scrape the metadata afterwards - like a normal movie)

But for bulk creation from a list, just use a simple batch file
- create folder moviename
- create empty file moviename\moviename.disc

hth

[gabardal]

Thanks for your answer, I think I could manage that, but how can I feed my collection to said batch file? I was thinking maybe a .csv file with the contents of all dvds, but still it would be tedious to create it by hand. Any way to simplify the process?
Cheers!

[garretn]

Tracking your DVD/BD collection (magically?) isn't going to happen without some manual work, and I've quite a bit of experience with this.

Personally I have over 1,300 BDs/DVDs on my shelves, and I've wanted to do the same -- create an offline collection much the same you're asking about now. There are several free and paid collection apps out there, several of which let you scan barcodes (with a barcode scanner or your smartphone, I use one that lets me use my smartphone) and track your collection that way. The problem I ran into is none of these are particularly friendly with getting the data out of, nor do they track them in a completely compatible structure. I went so far as to write a utility in perl to export/update my Kodi-sided collection, including tag w/custom posters that denote "Offline" directly on the artwork (we are talking a very large library of movies remember); problems I ran into included that these apps track media, so things like box sets don't necessarily list the included movies (some would, some would not), and occasionally it would have a different opinion of say what year a movie is from causing scraping problems later. I've yet to find a perfect solution.

The absolute fastest way isn't going to be a CSV, it's going to be a single lines in a text file exactly the way you want the folders named like myron suggested. For each line it to create the folder using the entire line as the name, then a file inside the folder with the same name + an extension. I'm not a windows guy but you shouldn't have too hard of a time finding out how to do it that way in a batch.

[nickr]

All you need is a filename for each DVD. Kodi will scrape all the info and artwork - you don't need to supply it.

Once your scanner app has made a list, it's a simple bash script to make a stub file for every entry. Kodi scraping will do the rest.

[garretn]

I think you misunderstood nickr (or perhaps I did?). The issue is he has 200 physical DVDs and was asking if there was any short cuts to generating the structure necessary for Kodi to recognize his physical collection as offline media. He already knows what that structure/those stub files are. How those are scraped later notwithstanding.

[nickr]

OK so it has been suggested that there is a bar code scanner that will give a list of the movies. Once you have a list it is a trivial task.

[gabardal]

Thank you everyone, I will look into these suggestions. But how about if I have, for instance, a dvd labeled my movies1 with folders movie 1, movie 2 and movie 3, with matching movie 1.mkv, movie 2. avi, movie 3.mp4 inside each folder, I was thinking if theres a way for me to insert the dvd, let it be scanned for files, and save these data to a database, txt or csv file (including dvd label, needed for the stub to specify the location of the offline file), for later proccessing of this database into creating file/folder structure of the media stubs. That, I think, would almost automate the process. Is there a way to achieve this?
Again, thank you all for your help, cheers!

[garretn]

You'd run into the same issue I was describing earlier. The collection programs I mentioned, some of them anyway, can identify disks and track them like that just like with the barcodes I mentioned. The problem is the only good programs I've come across that do a decent job of tracking a collection do not make that data easy to get at, and the data it provides doesn't quite match up to names/years in commonly scraped databases like IMDB. You'll end up spending far more time correcting these issues then you would if you just did a simple text list and a batch file/simple script to generate the structure for you.

[nickr]

Try tellico, I did a quick try out yesterday. It is very simple to add a movie (by name, no barcode scanner on my laptop). Then it downloads data from imdb, and easy to export to csv file with just name and year.