Kodi Community Forum

Hello,

I realize XBMC does a good job recognizing video files as long as you carefully name and locate these files in a rigid hierarchical directory structure. From what I understand from all my reading, XBMC is unable, however, to recognize both movies and TV video files if they are stored in a common directory (i.e. with no hierarchical structure).

I don't have any problem with the naming conventions, but I'm searching for an easier way to organize all the TV and movie video files.

I have roughly 160 files spread out over 4 HDDs, and trying to organize all my files in the structure that XBMC understands would be an unnecessary hardship, in my opinion. Has anybody written a script that can circumvent this XBMC restriction on organizing video files into separate directories?

I appreciate your help and insight you can give me in this matter.

Lou Vanek

It's not an unnecessary hardship. Episodic (TV) and one-off (Movie) events are handled completely differently and would be extremely error prone to even attempt in one go. We have these restrictions for reasons other than pissing a few lazy, disorganized people off. No script is going to get you around this, other than maybe setting content on each individual item. Which is far more work in the long run. For your experience to be near enjoyable, you'll want at least a movies dir and a TV dir that contains a dir for each series. So long a things are named sanely (I doubt this is the case given the mess you describe), things should scan into the library reasonably well.

So, you're saying the answer is "no," even though Boxee does it, and Boxee is built on xbmc. Got it. That makes sense.

And boxee is unreliable at scanning.

It's something that will be looked at when the new library scanning stuff is worked on, but first and foremost the handling of separated episodic and one-off content will be optimized, as the vast majority of our users have these separated on the disk anyway.

Cheers,
Jonathan

Thanks for a sane response. I'm looking into seeing if I can correct this deficiency myself.

My experience with Boxee seems to be the exact opposite from what you've described. I guess things like that happen.

Thanks again.