[nickr]

You dont need Subfolders, so why should I create them? -

xbmc does. fullstop. move on please, there is no more to see here.

Yeah, kill little animals with you car, because everyone does. It hast to be good Please don't stop my innovative Inputs.

I hope that somebody is interested to upgrade the scraper. I think it would be really useful.

Believe me I don't want to stifle innovation, but the reality is that there is no pressure from the masses to make this change so if you want to do it, you'll need to do some coding, or find someone who can code and is keen to innovate something that nobody but you seems to want or need.

This is not the feature request part of the forum, it is the help part of the forum. You have been helped, in that you have been told it cannot be done at present. If you want to create a feature request, that's cool, but do it in the right place.

Who knows, you may start a movement that gets big enough to get the devs interested.

Cheers, Nick.

[Glorious1]

the first 12TB of my videofiles are stored like This: TV Show -> Season -> Episodes
I dont want to use it that way anymore, because its a lot work to handle all the data. I think it was a good way the last 5 years, but its not that modern.

I'm curious why you think it's not "modern" to organize files in folders.
Anyway, if you use a good media manager, it's almost no work at all to handle the data. It can create the necessary folders, name them appropriately, rename and move files, and scrape them and prepare the NFO files and artwork, all automatically. Then all you need to do in XBMC is scan for new content and it is immediately in your library.

[kaffekask]

I'm curious why you think it's not "modern" to organize files in folders.

Well, blame the search engines, the operating systems and the mail programs.

Since Windows Vista Microsoft has tried to get people to search for the programs they wan't to run, now with W8 and no start menu you have to search for the program you want to start...

Gmail introduced a mail system where you should keep everything in the Inbox and search for mail instead of looking in a folder like you used to before.

Microsoft took that to Outlook 2007 and made the search function worse, so by default it only searches in the Inbox and they started to recommend people to nut use folders to get organized, instead you should catagorize the mail and search for the category.

Ans since people are lazy they use thatand think they are more productive and after a while they _must_ search for everything since nothing is organized and the amount of time it would take to get everything organized is overwhelming so they don't and keep searching...

That's how it's the modern way to keep everything in a big folder...

[imnotknow]

I agree with the original poster. It's also 'the Google way'. It may be simple right now to organize your media into folders on your 5tb of storage, but what about in 5 years when you have 100tb of storage or in 10 when you have an exabyte? I personally would like to just throw a bunch of files at xbmc and have it figure it out for me. I don't want to even imagine trying to organize an exabyte of data even with automated tools. Why should we have to organize everything? Google figured out a long time ago that doing things by hand doesn't scale. Is there somewhere to submit a feature request to the devs for this? I think they will be persueded when they think about it in terms of exabytes. Organizing media has become a laborious task and it needs not be.


Additionally, some media blurs the line between tv shows and movies, such as some documentaries. Why can't xbmc figure out what is a tv episode or a movie or a song?

[jmarshall]

Why can't xbmc figure out what is a tv episode or a movie or a song?

Because no-one has told it how. That's the thing with computer software: It's generally deterministic (even if sometimes things appear to be random) so if you tell it how to do something it'll be able to do it.

One of last years GSoC projects (Heimdall) was looking into how the scraper system might be generalised. It allows being able to build up information about an item progressively, and one of the uses for this is automatic categorisation of media. As you learn more about the media (filename, extension, parse it for regexps matching season/episode, runtime of media etc) you can build up a probabilistic model of what that media is likely to be, and then classify based on that.

So, to get XBMC to be able to do this, people have to volunteer to help tell it how - to write the code to incorporate Heimdall and improve it's classification techniques.

[imnotknow]

I don't think it would be that complicated. Someone has already classified most things you will have in your library and you could determine what it is by what database you find it in. If it's not a movie, It will probably be some kind of show.


I know someone will have to do the work for this, and they certainly will, eventually. When a dev throws his hands into the air and says 'It would take less time for me to adjust the code than it would for me to move, rename, and categorize the contents of my exabyte nano-array. I will do that.' I'd like to see it done sooner though. I would embark upon the challenge, but I'm only marginally familliar with the process of open source developmemt, and I can't code in c. Right now I don't even use the library feature because it is such an epic labor of love, and I would prefer to spend my time watching my media than organizing it.

[nickr]

You don't need to know how to code in C. You need to know how to code in C++.

So when you have something to contribute that is not "I think it should work MY way" please contribute your code.

Significantly the two major open source media player applications, mythtv and xbmc, require the user to specify whether particular media is movies or tv shows before scraping. Possibly not a coincidence. And believe me, both have very smart people programming this stuff.

[jmarshall]

Actually, you need to know how to code in python in order to contribute to Heimdall.

You might need some c++ knowledge to incorporate Heimdall into XBMC, though I'd suggest that if you simply helped out with Heimdall that would occur anyway as soon as Heimdall was clearly superior to the existing solution.

[philhu]

Go to the pytivo forum, look at other apps

Metagenerator 3 is easy to use, automated and will place your files/folder wherever you want!

You can specify tv show/season/episode, as the output format

It finds the shows, shows you sepisode by episode for renaming. Renames the shows to a standard format and will placve in a folder structure you setup.

Really very easy to use.

But why would someone want to MOVE 12TB of properly formatted files into a different file structure? Seems like alot of wasted time on your hands to me.

[thedude459]

I use couchpotato, sickbeard, and headphones to do all the moving, renaming and folder structure.

[MassIV]

Even with a torrent client you can set it up so that it automatically grabs the shows you want to follow from an rss feed.
And then have it save them to the folder it belongs in. All XBMC should be doing is index.

[Vathan]

The Boxee Box could handle all TV Shows in one big folder, scan & sort them by show, season & episode, and wasn't that based on XBMC? I loved my Boxee and still have it, but because it could not shuffle a folder of videos and play all my music in random without the use of a playlist I went back to XBMC on a HTPC...and had to organize all my shows by folder - UGH.

I personally would like to have all of my TV Shows in one big folder again because I am inherently lazy when it comes to keeping files neat and organized and would just prefer XBMC to automatically read everything in the folder, sort it by show title and season.

Movies are all in one big folder and XBMC can scan each one of them and tell what it is, so how much more would it take to get XBMC to scan all the TV Shows in one folder and sort them like the Boxee did/does by show>season>episode?

[anahka2309]

I use SickBeard to automate creation of folders. Pretty simple and fast.

[morfraen]

Episodes from different TV shows in one folder? Nope. No way. Not going to happen.

Why though...? The scrapers already get all the info they need from each individual file, why does the folder structure matter at all?

[Famous Mortimer]

Is the "different files in the same folder" a problem for films as well? I've got a sub-folder for Christmas movies in my main movies folder, but when I go to look for them, they just don't show up. It would be handy to figure out a way to resolve this, as I've got a few sub-folders for specific directors too which aren't showing up either.