[SmokeyC]

Hello All,

I'm looking for some advice from some pro's. I've got 1800 movies to adjust. Now the movies are all in one directory and each has a custom moviename.tbn file, so a toal of 3600 files. I could really do with advice on how to do this the best and easiest way.

I plan to change it to skin format:

For example my new directorys will be:

Movies
Movies\300 (2008)\
\\300 (2008).avi
\\300 (2008).tbn
\\300 (2008).nfo
\\300 (2008)-fanart.jpg
\\300 (2008)-poster.jpg
\\300 (2008)-folder.jpg
\\extrathumbs\
\\\thumb1.jpg
\\\thumb2.jpg

Ok first off, is this the correct setup?

The way I plan to do it, with all movies and TBN's in the same directory. I plan to use Media Companion to generate the nfo files and download the fanart.jpg.

Now is there an easy way to download posters, I have a big RAR file full of movie posters (not nearly enough though) - is it going to be a case of me renaming each one and adding to the directory?

I also have a large RAR file of extrathumbs - am I going to have to manually add extrathumbs, and add thumb jpg's or is there a handy little app/bat or program to do this which can download them?

Finally I'll use a little bat program I've downloaded to put all files into the correct folder.

So what's unclear to me really is how the easiest way to get folder.jpg, poster.jpg, and extrathumbs 1,2.jpg

Can I use XBMC to get the rest, I know they'd be put into my user cache thumbnails directory but if it saves me alot of work, is it worth doing?


Any one who can help me, thank you I really do apprechiate it. I've been using XBMC for years now and love the program, the AEON skin is amazing.

Chris

[Ram2000]

Use EMM it will do it ALL for you

[gareth108]

I have no where near the movie collection you do but I use Ember Media Manager. It is made for XBMC format and does everything you want. With it you can scrape for movie information, thumbs, fanart, extra thumbs, and even extract your own thumbs, as well as many other things. The most important thing about this program is it has a (place files into folders) option and an auto-renamer that renames all your files, folders, and extras to match with a XBMC format of your choosing. I only have just over 100 movies but it works great for me.

EDIT: LOL someone beat me to it

[SmokeyC]

Cheers Guys, I'll take a look. It's taken a long time to set this bad boy, up, I'm going to go bold by the end of it!

Chris

[DurhamDev]

I gotta ask - how did you go about amassing so many movies, and what hard drives do you have holding them all? I currently have over 600 DVD's which I'm planning (hoping, praying - lol) to code over to my hard drive, and I've been using a combination of DVD Decrypter and AutoGK. The quality isn't awesome when I rip to a 700MB file, but if I go with between 1400MB and 2GB, it looks pretty good.

What do you recommend?

[Ram2000]

I gotta ask - how did you go about amassing so many movies, and what hard drives do you have holding them all? I currently have over 600 DVD's which I'm planning (hoping, praying - lol) to code over to my hard drive, and I've been using a combination of DVD Decrypter and AutoGK. The quality isn't awesome when I rip to a 700MB file, but if I go with between 1400MB and 2GB, it looks pretty good.

What do you recommend?

I was the same but had double what you have there Over time I have managed to get them all on Divx or BRrip with the price of Hdds so low now I go for higher quality bigger files.

[technojunkie]

My collection isn't near as large, but I have 250 movies on 1TB of storage, the bulk of my collection is Xvid avi @ 1500kbps with AC3 audio. They average in size from 1.0-1.5 GB for a 90 minute movie. Since the new handbrake came out, I'm using x264 mkv @ 60% constant quality with AC3 and getting similar file sizes. Quality is just fine for me.

Do yourself a favor, try handbrake IMO it kills autoGK

[fnwc]

I'm using unRaid to store movies, music, etc. on a server which has 8 x 1.5TB drives. One of the drives is used as parity (approx = 10.5TB usable), so that if a single drive fails, I can reconstruct all of the data.

The server cost about $1100 (not including the unRaid Pro license), the bulk of which (~$850) was spent on the drives.

[DurhamDev]

Do yourself a favor, try handbrake IMO it kills autoGK

Good call - I had actually forgotten about Handbrake, and made the mistake of installing AutoGK after reading a Google'd article named, "How to make DVD rips like aXXo."

[mcborzu]

Try Ember Media Manager

Put like 6-10 movies in a test directory and play around with the program, so just in case, you don't screw things up for your whole collection only those 6-10 movies.

From the sounds of what you want EMM should be able to do what you want.

[snuffy1pro]

I too use Ember Media Manager. It helps as my collection is well over 1200 movies. I use Unraid as well and between the 1200 movies and about 60 TV series at about 2300 episodes Unraid has shined. I also use it for full back up of all my docs, pictures, and music. Music totaling about 1tb... Drives are cheap, go with an unraid pro license. A lot of my movies, maybe 35% I have not even ran through AGK or handbrake. Why when you have the space...

[SmokeyC]

Hey Guys

Well it's not a bad little system, it's a Vista 64x and I have 4x1TB, and 1x1.5 and a 500GB for C Drive. It was a Gigabyte motherboard which had 6x SATA ports and an IDE.

As for the movie collection as soon as EMM has finished I will post some screenshots, it's been running for almost a day and a half and there's still a few more to do yet...

On the benefit side I've compleated my TV Eps and added them to ShowMix Aeon, it's fantastic....



But I do have a new problem so any advice would be good, I've been playing around with the settings and late last night I think I ht the toggle to remove the settings menu.

How the hell do I get it back when I have no settings menu to acess the settings, I understand the very basics of XML so I can change something if someone tells me what to change?

Any helps as always apprechiated.

Chris ;-)

[Ram2000]

Press C should have setting up near the top I think

[SmokeyC]

Well after 3 days of work, finally have the media imported, all TV series, all Movies and all music. It looks amazing with some fantastic HD backgrounds on my home screen, now all I have to do is work my IMON remote into it and read a couple of instructions on the forum.

A couple questions to any pro's:

1) In MUSIC multiplex view, when I am scrolling through my albums - there is nothing to tell me who it is by or what the album is? Not even an album filepath i.e Red Hot Chilli Peppers or REM....

Is there any way to enable this, an option or mod, as I'd prefer not to use list view.

2) When playing music visualisations don't kick in unless I leave it for a while, can something not appear on the home screen (like if a video was playing) or in the background like PM3.

Is there any way to achieve this?


Chris.