Kodi Community Forum

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.

MP4Box seems to be able to extract info from mp4 files, but I don't have any files with covers etc to try it out on.

Ran into this when I first started to actually use the library features of XBMC, when I made an XBMC PC to replace my original xbox. While at first I was annoyed, it really didn't seem to make any major difference. I had been using MetaX to write the MP4 metadata, and MetaX was downloading cover art, summaries, etc, from the same sites that XBMC used. Sometimes things might change slightly, like the cover art, if there was a long time between making the MP4 and scanning it into XBMC, but either the change wasn't too bad or it was easy enough to modify (Add-on:XWMM (wiki) is great for this. Not sure if it's updated for Frodo yet).

Since I test various things out in XBMC, I often just rebuild my library from scratch. Outside of a few movies having odd choices for movie cover, the fresh data works fine for me. I still maintain MP4 data in the file when it's in MP4 format, too, for cases where I use another program or something like that.

I would love for XBMC to be able to read the MP4 data, but it's a bit tricky. Even if XBMC did extract it (without an external tool), XBMC philosophy is that XBMC shouldn't touch your original files, so I doubt the devs would have XBMC write back any changes that were made via XBMC. Basically it would work like MP3s work now, where you can import an MP3 and XBMC reads the metadata, and you can change that metadata, but changes aren't saved back to the internal metadata.

But hey, who knows. It mainly depends on if an XBMC dev wants to take the task up. There might even have been past attempts. I do know that we have some changes in the pipe for scraper stuff, so all sorts of new things will be likely possible in the future that previously were not.

As far as i know Plex and XBMC have the same "foundation" regarding the code.
In Plex there is a Local Media Scraper that can read and use all of the MP4 Metadata embedded in the file. I would really love to see XBMC can do the same.

Spiff has done a POC for MP4 metadata for XBMC: https://github.com/notspiff/xbmc-cmake/c...bf9ef2203e

It just needs someone to see it through and work on it to be included into the normal XBMC master branch. I'm hoping someone is interested and takes a whack at it.