[richt]

I am just starting to try out XBMC. I have been using Meedio for years, but the recent release of XBMC looks like it might be enough to move me away from Meedio.

I have a large library of movies that are named differently than XBMC will handle with the IMDB scraper. I read about the advancedsettings.xml file and am wondering if it is possible to add a regex expression for alternate movie naming conventions other than stacked files.

My movies files are named "title -- IMDb.tt00000", where the tt.00000 is the actual IMDb ID for the movie. I found this very useful in Meedio because if I have to drop the database and re-scan the movie folders and search for data, the add on I use in Meedio will recognize and use the IMDbID in the search, eliminating duplicates and errors completely.

Can XBMC be customized in this way? If so, I'm not that great with REGEX so any help there would be appreciated as well.

[HGBaum]

I think that's a good proposal. I have no idea if that could be realised and on which effort, but using unique IDs to identify the movie sounds really wise to me!

[KidKiwi]

nfo files do basically the same thing. XBMC scrapes them first (it contains the IMDB ID). You can tweak these to show only the info you want. There is even a program to create/tweak them (Media Companion). Not sure this specifically helps you though ??

[richt]

Thanks for the responses. It sounds like that I can't do exactly what I was hoping to. I just wanted to import my movies into XBMC without having to
1-Individually update every movie in XBMC
or
2-Rename all my movies (again)

[dandirk]

Hey Rich!!!! Former Meedio user myself, just started with XBMC a month or so ago...

I found the scapper in XBMC to be better then meedios overall, though I just name my folders with the name of the movie ("The" and "A" etc at the end...).

From what I have read many people use the year in the folder/file name to gather better scrapes but oh well.

How are the scrapes with your current naming scheme?

If you were to try xbmc and the imdb scrape is 90% accurate then I would stick to your current naming convention in case you want to go back to MeediOS when its done.

I found the use of NFO files to be extremely useful for this type of stuff, granted its old tech from back in the myHTPC days. But once you update and change the file the way you want all future scrapes will pull from the file instead of imdb... This also makes the scraping 10x faster.

As mentioned Media Companion (do a forum search) if fairly nice front end for scraping and creating nfo files and cover downloads...

[WhatMonkey]

I am new xbmc user coming over from meedio as well. Redoing my 415 or so movies is a bit of pain, I am using Media Companion, and it does help ease the pain a bit. Reading the MeediOS forums the last few days it looks like there is a good chance at least one importer will support importing the info from .nfo files. So I am hoping with help from Media Companion, I will not have to do a major overhaul of my movies again for quite awhile, no matter which program I use.