I am running XBMC Live that I installed onto the hard drive of an ASRock ION. I have all my DVDs stored as ISOs on another networked machine (running Windows) and I am streaming these to the XBMC machine. Genererally, it is all working fine; the streaming works flawlessly and I can watch all of my DVDs without any problems.
However, I would love to be able to have all of the correct DVD cover art and information available when I browse my library through XBMC. I have tried the scrapers but find that they have limited success. Some are fine, but the majority are either completely wrong, show a different cover (probably from non-UK information) or show nothing at all. This is especially true of multi-DVD box sets or DVDs for individual seasons/series. Ideally, as well as the artwork, I would like to see the episodes contained in the DVD so that I don't need to jump between ISOs to get the episodes I want to see.
Can anyone recommend a way to do this in XBMC Live?
I have no issue with changing my XBMC installation to run on top of Linux or Windows if necessary.
I did have a look at the DVDProfiler2XBMC but haven't tried this yet as the instructions weren't particularly clear. Does this need XBMC to run on Windows or does it run on the machine where the ISOs are stored?
Thanks
David
David,
-Can you give us some examples of how you have your movie files named that you are having trouble with?
If you really want to get into choosing the exact coverart that you want I would recommend using a program like
Ember Media Manager(EMM).
Quote:EMM will scrape movie and TV Show information (plot, cast, genre, studio, mpaa certification, etc) from various sites, together with posters, fanart, actor photos and even movie trailers. It also automatically extracts media meta data like resolution, codecs, audio and subtitle streams. EMM's primary aim is to export all the data and images to a format which can then be imported into XBMC. In order to achieve this, EMM stores all data and images in files which are saved next to the media files. XBMC can pick up those files and import the information to their own internal database.
After you use EMM to create metadata files that will sit next to your ISO, clear your XBMC library. Then have XBMC scan your files again. XBMC will automatically use the metadata that you created through EMM to build your library. It's great!
-When it comes to your TV series you are a bit out of luck. You will need to rename your TV series discs to get XBMC to play nicely with them but you will still have some issues. If you rename your discs to show what episodes they each have on them XBMC will download metadata for each episode. So if you had the first disc of the TV series Lost you may have it currently named something like this: Lost - S1D1.iso (S1 - Season 1 and D1 - Disc 1). XBMC doesn't know what to do with a file named like this. It may report that you have the TV series "Lost" in your library but it won't tell you anything about a particular season or episode. What you need to figure out is which episodes are actually on that disc. So if the first disc has episodes 1 -4 on it you would rename that disc to something that would look like this:
Lost - S01E01 - S01E02 - S01E03 - S01E04.iso
(S01 - Season 1 and E0* - Episode *)
This lets XBMC know that you have the first four episodes of the first season of Lost and it will go out and download the metadata accordingly. However, because all of these episodes are contained in one file XBMC will only download one episode screenshot. So in your library you will see a list of four "Lost" episodes all with their respective episode description but with the same screenshot. XBMC will behave a lot better if you pull out the individual episodes using a tool like MakeMKV so that instead of:
Lost - S01E01 - S01E02 - S01E03 - S01E04.iso
You will have:
Lost - S01E01.mkv
Lost - S01E02.mkv
Lost - S01E03.mkv
Lost - S01E04.mkv
You will lose your DVD menu's but you get the added bonus of the episode that you selected playing right away. I originally ripped my TV series to ISO's as well but I ended up using a tool like MakeMKV to pull out the individual episodes so that I could enjoy a smoother XBMC experience. MakeMKV is easy to use and it will read from the directly from the ISO's you have already made so it shouldn't take you
too long.
I hope this is helpful.
Sincerely,
Bahndit
Bahndit
Sorry for the massive delay in replying; I haven't had much of a chance to check back on the forums to see your post.
Thanks very much for the information. I will look into these and see what I can do with the software suggested. My current naming convention either has the name of the movie (e.g. Fargo) or the DVD disc (e.g. The Simpsons Season 5 Disc 1).
I am tending to come round to your way of thinking with your suggestion of moving away from ISOs. Whilst I liked the idea of having the complete functionality of the DVD menus and extras, I am now realizing that I am not really using them. Besides, I find that XBMC functionality is slightly reduced if I am on a DVD menu. I just need to get the time and motivation to do this. I have just under 4TB worth of ISOs, so it may take a while!
Thanks
David