[manekineko]

I have my movies sorted into folders following the recommended convention, with each movie in its own folder.

Is there a way to force XBMC to stack the files in that folder no matter how different their names may be?

It seems like XBMC is being conservative with its stacking to protect people that just dump all their files into one directory, whereas it could be more aggressive for my case.

[jmarshall]

What are the filenames in the folder?

[manekineko]

What are the filenames in the folder?

I get them from a lot of different sources, so I'm having a lot of different formats for the filenames.

Some of the ones I've recently manually renamed are like this:
file1.avi
file2.avi

or

file1of2.avi
file2of2.avi

However, I already know that for every movie, there is only one movie in that folder no matter many files there are or how weird their names may be.

[Skram0]

I get them from a lot of different sources, so I'm having a lot of different formats for the filenames.

Some of the ones I've recently manually renamed are like this:
file1.avi
file2.avi

or

file1of2.avi
file2of2.avi

However, I already know that for every movie, there is only one movie in that folder no matter many files there are or how weird their names may be.

Have you tried to "Clean" your database? You may have redundant entries, and a cleaning should remove the entries that don't exist anymore. I think settings->video or somewhere around there should get you to the option.

[manekineko]

Have you tried to "Clean" your database? You may have redundant entries, and a cleaning should remove the entries that don't exist anymore. I think settings->video or somewhere around there should get you to the option.

Yeah I've cleaned my database. The problem is definitely that XBMC isn't stacking some video files together. After I rename the files and then clean and rescan my database, the files show up properly stacked as one movie.

[jmarshall]

Right - the point is that they're very related filenames, they're not arbitrary at all. Thus an arbitrary stacking scheme is still not advised, even if you KNOW you have only one movie per folder. You may, for instance, have extras, trailers, commentaries etc. in the folder with that movie.

I agree that you can be more flexible with what is stacked (such as allowing the regexps that typically match sequels) if you know there's only a single movie per folder, but you still can't allow arbitrary things.

I'll keep this in mind. For now, your only option is to add to the regexps.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[manekineko]

Right - the point is that they're very related filenames, they're not arbitrary at all. Thus an arbitrary stacking scheme is still not advised, even if you KNOW you have only one movie per folder. You may, for instance, have extras, trailers, commentaries etc. in the folder with that movie.

I agree that you can be more flexible with what is stacked (such as allowing the regexps that typically match sequels) if you know there's only a single movie per folder, but you still can't allow arbitrary things.

I'll keep this in mind. For now, your only option is to add to the regexps.

Cheers,
Jonathan

Thanks. Is there a pre-created very broad set of regexps anywhere I can reference?

[manekineko]

For anyone else in the same situation, I added the following into my advancedsettings.xml:

Code:

<advancedsettings>
  <moviestacking action="append">
    <regexp>(.*)([0-9]+)(.*?)(\.[^.]+)$</regexp>
  </moviestacking>
</advancedsettings>

This seems to be working, but unfortunately, the changes aren't affecting any movies already in the library. It seems that stacking information must actually be stored in the database?

I still see duplicates for multi-file movies, and then I just move the files out, clean the library, and move the files back, and they are merged into one. This is obviously a huge pain, though, and I was wondering if there is any way to force XBMC to rebuild its database, preferrably without losing any other information like which ones I've played already.

[jmarshall]

Anything already in the library was stacked using the regexps at the time of scan, yes.

If you rescan the folders that contain the multi-file movies only (i.e. file mode, highlight the folder, context, scan for new content) then I think it'll pick them up, but I'm not certain.

The alternative is touching each of the folders (eg add or modify a file in them) and the scanner will pick them up as changed.

I'm not sure how to do this nicer in future yet still allow fast identification of changes - we currently stat() the folder in order to determine whether any changes have been made (which is much, much faster than fetching the directories fully). I guess we could salt the hash with the settings that are in effect at the time, but that would force everything to rescan (though not everything will be re-added under the current scheme).

Cheers,
Jonathan