Hi,
I bought some DVDs of a Children Cartoon for my Son. I then copied the DVDs to disk and converted it to a mkv file - just one file which is like one hour long and contains various episodes (those are only 5-10 Minutes each).
Is there any way I can make it show up under TV Shows? I mean XBMC already finds it as TV Show but with 0 Episodes. Can I somehow generate a NFO file to declare the list of episodes and link it to those files? Are there tools for this?
I have quite a lot of TV Shows which don't work, or have not all episodes recognized and there is no way to navigate to those Files in XBMC when using any other skin as the standard one. This is giving me quite some headaches.
You can write your own NFO files in a text editor and scrape those - but, if you don't want to simply chop the file up (and mkvmergegui would do a good job of doing that for you), you probably want to just rename the files - <seriesname> - 1x01x02x03 would look up <seriesname> and then add entries for episodes 1, 2 and 3 in series 1.
They will all point to the same file, though, not to a particular position in that file.
I rather don't want to go through the trouble of splitting the files with mmg - I just don't have the time for this and it's not needed as I don't know the episode numbers anyway and most of the German cartoons won't be scraped anyway.
I had a look at the tvshow.nfo from another show - which was correctly imported into XBMC but I couldn't find information about the Episodes in there, except a link to the episode guide as a zip file. Do I need to write a tvshow.nfo myself and then one nfo file for each file / episode?
Is there some tool for this that helps me or do I have to use vi? In the end it comes down to writing a lot of files for all my shows which would take days!
You don't have to use vi, any text editor will do. Just create a file with the desired XML tags and use it as a template for your other nfo files. Since you'd mentioned vi, I'm assume you're running Linux? If so, take a look at this sample bash script that will create nfo files for each of your movie files from a template file. You'll still need to edit each nfo to add the movie-specific information, but at least the files and basic layout are already there.
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pid1359248
Thanks, I was thinking of either doing it the quick and dirty way with a bash script and maybe using sed to get the episode numbers into those nfos or write a more sophisticated program quickly with Xcode.
But the main problem I have is that I probably need some kind of tutorial. I checked out the wiki pages over here
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=NFO_files
and tried to write this stuff into a .nfo file but removing the URLs - and now my TVShow is not listed anymore at all. And XBMC keeps crashing, but this might be an OSX issue so I'm testing now with Win8. Or maybe this nfo is the minimal xml that is needed and I'm not allowed to leave out some tags I don't use.
EDIT: Ok I managed to get the series to show up and it shows me now an episode entry for every episode where I supplied this basic nfo file. So far so good. But I can not get the
Thumbs to work. Any idea what I have to do? I copied a .jpg from another TV Show so the dimensions should be ok, and I named it 'TVEpisodeName-thumb.jpg' like the others, but it doesn't show. No matter if I supply a <thumb> tag to this image, an URL or none tag at all.
Can anyone help me out here please?