Several questions regarding Apple TV and XBMC
#1
Smile 
Hey guys,

I've been hunting for a good media center setup that'll play nice with my curent setup for the past few weeks.

I currently have a 500GB hard drive hooked up to an Airport Extreme base station. It's working just fine and I can stream video files to all my macs and PCs.

However, I want to be able to watch those files on my TV. I downloded XBMC and installed it on my MacBook Pro and gave it a test drive. So far it's been working great, I was able to add my Airport Disk as a source and browse the files and see the preview thumbnails.

One of the things I wasn't able to set up was the TV Shows and Movies category in the MediaStream GUI (or skin). If I select "TV Shows", nothing appears. I have to go to Videos, select the source, pick the show and play it back.

I was wondering how can I configure XBMC so the TV Shows category properly finds the TV shows stored on my Airport Disk, and automatically download cover art and meta data.


Oh, and another thing. How safe is to install XBMC on an Apple TV? Let's asusme I buy one now, which I assume will have the latest firmware installed.
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#2
Guille779 Wrote:Oh, and another thing. How safe is to install XBMC on an Apple TV? Let's asusme I buy one now, which I assume will have the latest firmware installed.

I think it's pretty safe, you can always factory restore back to the out-of-the-box software version.

AppleTVs will come with some version of 2.x. Might be r.2.3 but I would bet more like 2.0.2 or 2.1. 2.3 is only a week or so old and 2.2 is a few month. Too short of time to get into the production AppleTVs.

If you like MediaStream, I think there is a lite mode that will work well under the AppleTV.
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#3
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davilla Wrote:I think it's pretty safe, you can always factory restore back to the out-of-the-box software version.

AppleTVs will come with some version of 2.x. Might be r.2.3 but I would bet more like 2.0.2 or 2.1. 2.3 is only a week or so old and 2.2 is a few month. Too short of time to get into the production AppleTVs.

If you like MediaStream, I think there is a lite mode that will work well under the AppleTV.

Thanks for your quicl reply!

To clarify a few things, my current setup is:

A folder called "TV Shows" and a folder called "Movies"

Each TV show has it's own folder with the following hierarchy:

Californication
Season 2
Californication S02E04 - [episode name].avi

So, what I would like to have is the TV Shows category in MediaStream to organize my tv show according to this hierarchy. Download show info (show description, episode synopsis), show cover art and so on. The same goes for movies.

Any ideas on how to do this? How do I tell XBMC which files to look for? Huh
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#4
Make sure that you set the content of the folder to "TV Shows" and set a scraper for it (tvdb works great for me).
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#5
smcnally75 Wrote:Make sure that you set the content of the folder to "TV Shows" and set a scraper for it (tvdb works great for me).

How do set up the content? I can't find any option for it besides "Enable Library"

By the way, all my video files are stored on the Airport Disk running from the Airport Extreme base station. The drive is HFS+ (no journaling). I don't know if this has anything to do with it.
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#6
You need to create a source for both TV and Movies. Holding the menu button for 2 secs brings up the context menu. If you're at the right place you can see add source or update if you want to change one. This is where you tell xmbc what the share holds (tv, movies, etc) and select the scrapper to read the files so it can guess better what it finds.

Mediastream works great on the atv, very fast even with lots of files. Once set up correctly, your TV shows will appear in the proper menu section just as your Movies will show up in the Movies section.
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#7
smcnally75 Wrote:Make sure that you set the content of the folder to "TV Shows" and set a scraper for it (tvdb works great for me).

Found it. I forgot the set the contents of the folder. Thanks man!
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Several questions regarding Apple TV and XBMC0