Kodi Community Forum

Hello, this is my first post here. I was recently introduced to xbmc by a friend and I absolutely love it. Love it! However, after following guides and setting up everything I have run into a few issues that I need help with. I am not sure what the causes are so I'll attempt to provide a thorough explanation of how everything is set everything up to make it easier to understand. If you want to view the issues right away, skip down to Issues. Also, if anything is unclear please point it out.

My media setup:
Both computers runs Windows 7. The first computer is the main downloading server that shares network folders. The folders contains TV Shows and Movies spread on two disk drives (Downloads1 & Downloads2). All the video files are compressed as .rar files and are organized in folders according to standard naming conventions. They only contain .iso, .img, .mkv and .avi files.

Due to sharing rules set by the utilized downloading source there's a requirement to organize Movies and TV Shows first by type (720p / 1080p / DVDR / Series) and then by Sample / NoSample folders which contains all the movie releases (Sample folders is not enforced for series). (In case you're wondering why - the samples are used for practical reasons, mainly to determine the quality of a release by downloading a single file of smaller size, instead of the whole movie release. It has to be this way and cannot be changed.)

A few examples of how the library is organized:

DVDR - Sample
- Downloads2\DVDR\Sample\A-DVDR-Movie-Folder\[rar files]

DVDR - NoSample
- Downloads2\DVDR\NoSample\A-DVDR-Movie-Folder\[rar files]

720p - Sample
- Downloads2\720p\Sample\A-720p-Movie-Folder\[rar files]

720p - NoSample
- Downloads2\720p\NoSample\A-720p-Movie-Folder\[rar files]

1080p (Sample & NoSample) is the same as above.

Series
- Downloads1\Series\A-Series-Folder\Season.01\A-Episode-Release-Folder\[rar files]


The second computer is a laptop connected to the same network with access to the shared folders and is running xbmc v10.1.

Issues

- First issue

When updating the library for TV Shows for the first time I did the following:
Right clicked the folder "Series" - Set Content - Check "Run automated scan" - OK
Everything is perfect.

I proceeded doing this for DVDR
Right clicked the folder "DVDR" - Set Content - Check "Run automated scan" and "Use folder names for lookups" - OK
This time nothing happened, and I realize it was probably caused by the subfolders Sample and NoSample. Now, the problem is that when I follow the same procedure on the NoSample folder it works perfectly, but not on the Sample folder. I don't understand why. It is the same with 720p and 1080p. The movies contained in the "Sample" folders are not added, only movies from "NoSample".

Answer - Any folders named "Sample" are excluded from search. Thus, having all movies contained in a folder named "Sample" will produce no result when attempting to update library.

-Second issue

A folder named like this
SeriesName.E01.720p.HDDVD.x264
does not follow the standard naming convention as it has no s01 in the name. This is probably done because there is only one season. Because of this the episodes are not automatically added to the library, only the main folder. How can the episodes be added to the library properly? Changing the folder name is not an option.

Answer - Modify regex, see post #5

-Third issue

If "Update library on startup" is checked, two empty series that does not exist are added. Is there any way to check what files have triggered the adding of a series?

I greatly appreciate any help and feedback. If anything is unclear please point it out and I'll attempt to improve it. If you want screenshots I can provide that as well.

Answer - see post #5

-BlueBottle

Quote:Due to sharing rules set by the utilized downloading source

You are pirating movies.. you don't have to follow rules when you are pirating movies. Real pirates don't care about rules. You shouldn't either. It's pants-on-head retarded to keep your long term movie files in compressed rar files. It creates problems like you've described, the rar compression makes the computer work harder than it needs to (and doesn't save any space. Honestly, I understand the multi-part rar, but the compression? Who told these people to compress movies in rars?), and it kills babies. Little cute babies. And puppies.

Ned Scott Wrote:It's pants-on-head retarded to keep your long term movie files in compressed rar files. It creates problems like you've described, the rar compression makes the computer work harder than it needs to (and doesn't save any space. Honestly, I understand the multi-part rar, but the compression?

Since you ask I'll answer

When it comes to rar archives, it is not done to save space. I think you will agree that having a movie divided into multiple files makes it easier to utilize several downloading sources for the same item.

There's also packet loss to consider. The internet is not perfect, and you cannot repair a .avi file that has been corrupted during transfer. In that case your only option is to download the whole file over again, which takes time. On the other hand, if just one (or even a few, though that rarely happens) .rar file(s) has been corrupted during the transfer, all you have to do is download that specific file and everything is good.

One doesn't have to use .rar archives to manage this, of course, but there are other advantages to using .rar, as I will try to explain.

There is value in .rar because by compressing, a release is kept original. You cannot fiddle with it (well, you can, but it's hard). And unless you don't care about malware, spyware, torjans, etc original is the way to go. Accompanied by a .sfv file .rar makes for a solid way to store stuff. And performance is not really an issue as the effort the computer must put into playing off directly from the .rar archives is hardly noticeable.


It does not make sense to me that the these issues are caused by the .rar archives. Does anyone else have any input on this?

-BlueBottle

BlueBottle Wrote:Since you ask I'll answer

It does not make sense to me that the these issues are caused by the .rar archives. Does anyone else have any input on this?

-BlueBottle

I'm not sure why the Devs even added support for rar archives...one of them must have had too much coffee one day. Things work better when video files are not compressed. Have you thought about newsgroups instead of torrents? No sharing necessary, no public IP and you can rename things whatever you want.

Actually I said I did understand the multi-part portion. It's the file compression on top of that which doesn't make any sense. One can rar a file without compression, and trying to use file compression on an already compressed movie file will save virtually no space. Never saw a virus installed from an .mkv file, and a torrent (and other modern P2P software) has far better protection from corruption (same basic idea as the multiple rar files, but better executed and transparent to the end user). It's a hold over from Usenet's old limitations and nothing more.

From a technical standpoint, yes, XBMC should play and scrape rar'ed files. The reason I'm saying there's an issue is because of the rules that are preventing you from changing file names and organizing your content differently.

Issue 2 and 3 would be fixed right there, but as it is now you'll have to play with regex:

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Adv...atching.3E (and the section below it, "Filenames without Season")
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Reg...)_Tutorial

Specifically about issue 3, for the false entry bring up the contextual menu and get info on it. It should tell you the file path that is triggering the entry.

Not sure about issue 1. I can only guess that when the actual sample folder is being excluded from scans that it is somehow excluding the parent folder from scanning as well. It shouldn't do that, though. Could be a bug. Try running the scan with debugging on (System/Settings -> System -> Debugging) and post the XBMC.log file to pastebin (located just outside of the XBMC data folder. Location depends on OS. Each OS help sub-forum has a sticky post that can tell you where to find it.)

I do agree that .rar archives can be troublesome.

Thank you for suggesting the debug mode. The answer is that any folders named Sample are excluded from scan, which makes perfect sense. I can just change the name to ContainsSample or something and Issue 1 will be fixed.

I'll look into modifying the regex to fix Issue 2, and if Issue 3 persists I'll follow your instructions for that too.

Your answer was most helpful and much appreciated. Thanks!

BlueBottle Wrote:I do agree that .rar archives can be troublesome.

Thank you for suggesting the debug mode. The answer is that any folders named Sample are excluded from scan, which makes perfect sense. I can just change the name to ContainsSample or something and Issue 1 will be fixed.

I'll look into modifying the regex to fix Issue 2, and if Issue 3 persists I'll follow your instructions for that too.

Your answer was most helpful and much appreciated. Thanks! :)

No problems, and sorry if I was a bit of an ass. I just think it's kind of silly to worry about file sharing rules when getting these movies/tv shows are breaking much bigger rules in the first place ;)

but if you don't mind the regex stuff then XBMC should still be able to deliver. Hope it works out.