Hi Folks!
How many subfolders under the "TV Show" Source are possible to allow media files getting detected when refreshing the library?
Background of my Question:
Originaly my TV Show Database was structured as follows:
smb://192.XXX/serien/Titel (Year)/Season X/titel.S01E01.mkv
This worked perfectly fine.
Now, trying to better organize my TV Show Database and create some custom categories in Rapier (MCU, Phase 1, Phase 2,... MCU Serien...) i created some subfolders:
For Example:
smb://serien/_MCU Serien/Phase 3.1 Dare/Titel (Year)/Season X/titel.S01E01.mkv
Unfortunately the media Files in these folder structure are not detected anymore when i refresh the library. I assume Kodi has problems with the subfolders.
Does anybody know a solution for this?
PS:
When i go manually through Videos/Files/Serien/_MCU Serien/Phase X...to the folder of the TV Show and hit "search for new content" everything is found perfectly well. But there should be a smarter solution....
TV Shows need to be in directly in the Source folder, not buried levels down.
It needs to be
Source > TV Show
You seem to have
Source > Level 1 > Level 2 > TV Show which will not work.
In case you have not seen this...
https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Movie_universe
You can actually do it, but it takes some manual effort and is very much a non-standard configuration.
What normally happens is that you set your source as TV shows, and then by default all folders one level down from that source folder are set to have the "Selected folder contains a single TV show" enabled. As the name suggests, this is the level that the scraper takes to be a single show, and everything in it (whether in that folder or in sub-folders below it) are all scanned based on the show name (which is the name of that folder where the flag is set).
Taking your
smb://serien/_MCU Serien/Phase 3.1 Dare/Titel (Year)/Season X/titel.S01E01.mkv from your example above.
If you go to your folder tree in videos > files and then go to one of the top level folders within your source ("_MCU seiren", presuming the root source folder is "serien") then open the context menu and select "Change content" you will see the menu entries, with "Selected folder..." about half way down. It will be set to on/true/enabled, and so the scraper will go away and look for a tv show named "_MCU Serien", which of course it won't find.
What you can do is unset the flag in that menu, and then set it again lower down for the folder level that actually does contain the single TV show and then scrape. If the folder name where you set the flag is named the same as a show in the scraper site database then it will find it and be scraped. So your example above won't work as "Phase 3.1 Dare" isn't in the scraper database. However if you name it "
Marvel's Daredevil" then it will be found and scraped properly (presuming that's the show you're referring to.
If you have a very non-standard tree structure then it will take a lot of work to manually set everything up, but it can be done. Generally though it's not recommended to get too abstract with things, as it of course needs to be maintained and set up for every new show you may add.
In my set-up I do something along these lines to split my TV shows by Genre (with 6 different genre folders), but only to one level deep and so for my set-up it's quite easy to maintain. There I set the root up as "This directory contains - None" (not TV shows) and then set the entries for the genre sub-folders as "This directory contains - TV shows" (again via the context menu for the folder). That effectively makes different TV show sub-sources within the same overall source, and gets the "Selected folder contains a single TV show" flag set at the correct level in the folder tree.
(2021-07-31, 12:26)Karellen Wrote: [ -> ]TV Shows need to be in directly in the Source folder, not buried levels down....
Hi Karellen!
Thank you for your Response!
But this is sad news. Why is this so restricted compared to Movies? In my Movie Library i have 3 Subfolder Levels (Movies/_MCU/Phase 1/1/Copper Man (2008)) and all movies are detected without issues. And TV Shows cannot even handle 2 Levels of Subfolders?? Is that intended?
(2021-07-31, 14:22)DarrenHill Wrote: [ -> ]You can actually do it, but it takes some manual effort and is very much a non-standard configuration....
Thank you Darren!
I need to think about how i can use your suggestions. Obviously i want to avoid marking every individual Show Folder with the "Contains only one show" setting.
My Idea was to create me a complete MCU Library using Rapiers Custom Categories. This worked perfectly fine with the Movies icluding grouping of the different Phases.
Now i wanted to add the TV Shows in the same way and link them to the Phases in wich they started. But this seems to be more complicated than i thought....
The difference is movies are recursive in their search, as they tend to be singular entities (the movie will just be one file, although of course there may well be associated metadata stuff like posters, subtitles etc) whereas TV shows by nature are multiple entities (individual files for individual episodes within the overall folder of the show).
That causes some distinctions in how the scrapers work. For scraping movies, you're targetting a single file, whereas for shows you're targetting a folder. Identifying the latter is much more difficult, hence the problems you're seeing.
For example, if I want to I can put all my movies in one big folder, and as long as they are appropriately named then the scraper will pick them up (although posters etc will probably end up as an unholy mess of overwriting each other, so doing so isn't recommended).
But if you want the show to be picked up, it's the name of the folder (the one with the flag set on it) that has to be correct. Within that, the only thing the episode files need are the correct SxxExx designation somewhere in their filename that the scraper can unabiguously pick up to identity it. You could even just call the first episode of season 1 "S01E01.mp3" and the scraper would pick it up fine and correctly (assuming the parent folder name was correct, and that episode actually exists in the scraper database). Everything else (sub-folders for seasons, almost anything else in the filename) is just ignored by the scraper, unless of course it is other similar numberings in the name which can confuse things.
So in your case, what you can do is two things:
1) make an entirely separate source for each of your show universes, and then set them up as normal. You can of course have multiple uri addresses within each source if you want to.
2) set everything up so that all of your linked shows folders are in the same parent folder (smb://serien/_MCU Serien/Phase 3.1/ for example) and then in that folder, put the correctly named (as in the scraper database) folder for the relevant shows in that phase. Set the tree (the serien folder) up as content "None", then go down to the Phase 3.1 folder and using the context menu, set the content of that folder to TV Shows. That will automatically set the flag for each sub-folder in it, which in this case will be your individual phase 3.1 shows. Do the same with all the other phases, making their folders at the same level as Phase 3.1 (ie in the _MCU Serien folder).
Both will work, but take some setting up. But if you then add new shows into the phases, the flag should automatically be set on them due to the settings of the parent folder (I think, if not you'd need to do it manually), and they should scrape as well.
It's not really how we recommend to do it, but if you're prepared to do some work in setting it up it can be managed.
Hi Darren,
thank you, that makes sense. Not sure if this exra Mile is worth it...
Maybe i just add a second source for MCU TV Shows. Than i can at least use this path for a contition in a smart playlist to create a custom Category (e. g. MCU/ Phase 1, Phase 2...MCU Serien....). This way the shows cannot be connected to the Phases but i think i can live with that.
Kind Regards