2013-02-03, 01:06
I've been managing my movies, TV shows, and home videos in iTunes ever since that functionality was first introduced — so obviously, for several years, I've been stuffing my DVD rips, Bluray rips, and home movies into MPEG-4 containers with the goodies it supports: multiple audio tracks, subtitles, chapters, hinting, movie information, artwork, descriptions, cast lists, SD/HD tags, etc. Fortunately, MP4 caught on in the non-Apple world, too, so I've been sticking with it.
Recently, I saw XBMC at a friend's house, and I was quite impressed with it compared to my Apple TV 3, so much that I'd like to replace my ATV with an HTPC running Linux/XBMC. I've avoided buying from the iTunes Store (just the occasional rental), so I downloaded XBMC to my MacBook to test-drive it.
Unfortunately, XBMC seemed like it completely ignored all of my files' metadata! Foreign films' scraped data was not in English, my home videos showed up as real movies, and there were just a few wrong ones (Goldmember showed up as something called Goldman). If XBMC had read the MP4 metadata, this wouldn't be a problem.
I looked over the wiki on how to make it read my metadata, but all I could find are some years-old forum posts saying MP4 metadata is not supported. Is that still true? If so, are there any utilities to read MP4 metadata and write NFO/TBN files?
I'd love to hear some words of wisdom from other people who have successfully made the switch from iTunes/Apple TV to XBMC.
Recently, I saw XBMC at a friend's house, and I was quite impressed with it compared to my Apple TV 3, so much that I'd like to replace my ATV with an HTPC running Linux/XBMC. I've avoided buying from the iTunes Store (just the occasional rental), so I downloaded XBMC to my MacBook to test-drive it.
Unfortunately, XBMC seemed like it completely ignored all of my files' metadata! Foreign films' scraped data was not in English, my home videos showed up as real movies, and there were just a few wrong ones (Goldmember showed up as something called Goldman). If XBMC had read the MP4 metadata, this wouldn't be a problem.
I looked over the wiki on how to make it read my metadata, but all I could find are some years-old forum posts saying MP4 metadata is not supported. Is that still true? If so, are there any utilities to read MP4 metadata and write NFO/TBN files?
I'd love to hear some words of wisdom from other people who have successfully made the switch from iTunes/Apple TV to XBMC.