[sircube]

Hi,

what's the easiest way to get movie thumb(s) and nfo stored also in the same directory as scraped movie file. (primarily from imdb.com and thetvdb.com).

I use XBMC in one room for watching movies+organize my archive.
Other room: on NAS: Mediatomb 0.12 to work as UPnP server and use PS3 for movies. BTW: PS3 is pain in the ass!
My Mediatomb import scripts are customized to grab nfo to file description and <avi filename>.png to transcode to video-thumbnail.

Using external tools like XMBC Movie Companion is not an option for me. Want to keep everything simple with least proggys.

Have searched the Forum without too much success so far. What do you suggest?

[spiff]

only thing i can suggest is a bit of patience, we are working on it

[Jaco2k]

only thing i can suggest is a bit of patience, we are working on it

How is the work going?

This is one of my niggles also - different scrappers have different images, some have thumbnail but no fanart and others vice-versa.

Can't you make it default for XBMC to retrieve this information to the movie dir?

[spiff]

you can now export your library. and no, it won't do it 'by default' nor will it ever. we use a database for very good reasons

[kemik]

Can you not use the MyMovies Collection Manager to do this?

[TeknoJnky]

you can now export your library. and no, it won't do it 'by default' nor will it ever. we use a database for very good reasons

I don't think anyone disputes using a database, however there are certainly just as good reasons to allow the info to be exported more dynamically and automatically than it is.

One big reason would be multiple clients sharing the same video/audio files.. each one scraping individually increases the bandwidth requirements (both user and server) and server loads of those services.

Until such a time that one central library database and cache is utilizable by multiple clients, the desire to automatically export nfo/thumbs/fanart will continue.

[spiff]

and until one of you guys who actually NEED such functionality stop talking about it, but steps up and does the work, that won't happen.

[mngrl1]

you are a grumpy bastard spiff

[Jaco2k]

and until one of you guys who actually NEED such functionality stop talking about it, but steps up and does the work, that won't happen.

If I had any idea how to do it, would I actually ask?

But exporting the library has nothing to do with what I am saying - I understand you want to keep the actual media being handled clean and with the least interference possible, but at least give the option - I stated a good reason why it would be usefull - no scrapper has it all and it would be good if it would be possible to combine multiple scrappers...
...actually, come to think of it...

If the option to write to the folders (i.e. thumbs and fanart) is a no-no, why not give us a "multi-scrapper" option where 2-3 scrappers would be queried at the same time (at least for thumbs and fanart) and we could then pick the relevant/wanted images?

[marshalleq]

Actually, another good reason is that scraping of media isn't yet perfect by any shape. If XBMC has detected wrong info for any reason, going in manually and selecting the correct movie manually often works. But, the next time you install XBMC fresh you have to do it all again. Not a problem if you only have 10 movies, but if you only had 10 movies you probably wouldn't need to run an XBMC library. Let's not forget the purpose of a media center here.

If there were a tick box that said 'also export nfo file' when you manually select a title it would prevent the need to continually manually set things that aren't right.

That said, the lastest binary XBMC itiration (not SVN as I have no idea how to compile that for live) has an incredibly improved library. After much reading it's fairly easy to enforce a specific page to be scraped by putting a url in an nfo file which IS picked up after a fresh install, however even this doesn't always work. (Perhaps there should be a comment noted in the manual scan option to look at a specific xbmc web page for help when having problems with the library?

Additionally, if XBMC WAS intelligent enough to export nfo files or export/import the library properly there would be no need to wait for hours while it rescans everything and downloads everything. I literally have to leave mine for days to get the info down.

The export/import library option doesn't seem to associate the imported info with the media files until I do a scan which to me defeats the whole purpose and continues to leave me faced with several days of scanning. A key feature of the export/import function should in my opinion be that it must be able to be used without an internet connection. I don't believe this is currently the case.

Also for media that doesn't have any online information (often music concerts seem to fit into this category) it's a real pain having to manually create an xml or nfo file for this, I need to download or make a cover graphic, and find out all the info manually and manually type it in. Effectively all this results in the use of multiple scraping and manual selection techniques for maintaing a single library, not particularly nice or user friendly at all.

I believe it takes an understanding of all these things (and no doubt others I have not thought of) to truly understand the direction the library should be heading in.

The grumpy comment above is an all too unfortunate case these days, some people have ideas, some people can program, some people test, it's the collaboration that makes this work and the willingness to accept someone elses view. Often in open source programmers limit the ideas if they don't agree with them because the ideas people can't enforce an idea to take place. So far XBMC has an excellent track record, let's hope that the amount of requests for this will get through to someone whom can and will actually implement it. I have a feeling that librarys are quite important to the dev crew.