So clearly I am a new user to XBMC that is switching from WDTV Live series players. With the WD players they liked all the files in 1 big folder otherwise it wouldn't show the Actor/Movies information unless you opened each folder. Well I have a collection of around 400 movies and this has clearly created 1 huge mess for me since XBMC recommends the opposite. So I have a couple questions...
1) Is there a program out there that will organize all these files for me? I prefer a free one but if I have to purchase it so be it.
2) Should I delete all the old xml, jpg, etc files that the WD units have made.
or
3) Should I not even worry about it and leave everything as it is.
1. A good, free program (windows only) for renaming/organizing is
theRenamer. It can rename and create folders for movies in one step. It also handles tvshows. I couldn't live without it now.
2. I'm unclear of the naming conventions that WD uses for their interface, so I don't know if xbmc will read that metadata or not.
3. Provided your movies have accurate names for the file, xbmc will be able to scan and scrape them just fine, but if you ever choose to export the metadata from the database, that one big folder will become one big mess.
Well it's already one big mess! Which is why I am wanting to clean it up. I am pretty sure XBMC doesn't read the metadata from WD. Right now it doesn't show any data for my files within XBMC. I have been scared to run the scraper in fear of creating even more of a mess. I will give theRenamer a shot, Thanks!
+1 on theRenamer, you should definitely use this first. But don't do all 400 at the same time, Google doesn't like that
Ember Media Manager can scrape all the info, art, trailers etc. for you automatically. Just make sure you choose the "Ask (Require Input If No Exact Match Found)" is on.
Ember has a thread in this section, look for Dan Cooper's signature for the up to date version.
It also has a great file renamer built into it that can use variables for renaming.
Depends on how OCD you are about file management
Well I finally pushed all my movies through theRenamer. Man this software is freakn awesome. It saved me hours of my life! It did have a problem figuring out a few files so I had to manually rename them and then pushed them back through theRenamer. Looks like I will be pushing all my files through this when I add them to my collection. TV Episodes is where this software looks to really shine, although I don't have any.