[dazadaza]

Hi all

I have recently installed XBMC on my Boxee Box, and discovered that XBMC handles NFOs for TV shows somewhat differently...

I have a tvshow.nfo in my show-root and episode NFOs in the season folders. However for running shows I may not be up to date on the NFOs, and XBMC refused to insert episodes without an NFO in the library. This I found out was because the show NFO was missing a tag, episodeguideurl.

I am now re-scrapping my collection in EMM to add this tag, but I'm not really sure how to handle this in the future...

1. Delete all show-NFOs and let XBMS use title matching on everything. This will cause more use on the tvdb servers I guess, as well as increased size of the DB? Or does XBMC copy the information from NFO -> DB anyway? Would XBMC use the local fanart/poster even if it doesnt have a local NFO?

2. Use the show-NFO with the episodeguideurl-tag and keep addind apisodes "willy nilly"(without NFOs, still in correct folders ofc). This would add some additional traffic to the tvdb servers? Any considerations for the DB?

3. Use show-NFOs without episodeguide-tag, but create NFOs for each new episode with EMM as I add them to the filesystem in the folders included in the library. How would this work with watchdog?(I have a question in that forum). Would watchdog send a signal that there is a new media-file to scan, and XBMC ignores it. What happens when I do add the NFO? Do I need to manually start a library update?



How are you guys handling this? What is the most efficient approach considering tvdb-usage, XBMC DB and manual labor?



Best Regards
Daniel

[skylarking]

Delete all show-NFOs and let XBMS use title matching on everything. This will cause more use on the tvdb servers I guess, as well as increased size of the DB? Or does XBMC copy the information from NFO -> DB anyway? Would XBMC use the local fanart/poster even if it doesnt have a local NFO?

It doesn't matter where the metadata comes from, whether from local nfo's or from the tvdb servers, as the metadata will all end up within your xbmc/sql data base.
And server load issues are for the server admins to resolve and not for you to worry about

For the moment, i always use local NFO's for movies and tv series.

In fact using a vanilla xbmc with no special user added plugins, i first scrape my rips using themoviedb and thetvdb from the pc i have connected to the internet. After scrapping, i then export my database as individual files and then copy the new films/eposides/nfo's/jpegs to my htpc before deleting them from the internet connected pc and performing a clean library. The directory structures i have defined on both the pc and htps are that same and are named bluray, dvd, tvseries (with sub subdirectories for each series and further subdirectories for each season). This makes it easy to move my files across but one day i may automate the copy/delete/cleandb task.

It's is more labour intensive for sure but for me the benefit is that i'm in control of the metadata and can uninstall/reinstall xbmc at any time and rebuild my database without needing to use bandwidth from my slow and expensive wireless broadband connection. So having local metadata via nfo's/jpgs/etc makes it trivial to fix issues or change setup (change/move hdds, install nas, etc) without accessing the internet. The downside is that it is a little more labour intensive (until i write some scripts to automate it all) and the directories have nfo's and jpegs scattered within (which some people just don't like but it doesn't bother me).

And i haven't had any problems when i scraping a new season for a given series. Maybe that's because i buy the disks and rip all season episodes together before scraping that season, rather than using pluggings than pull individually episodes from the ether and scrapes them when they are available. Or maybe it's simply because i haven't done any updates in the last few months and there is some xbmc issue (currently i'm on xbmc 13.1rc1).

Are there better ways, probably yes, but i haven't had the need to explore them as my vanila xbmc install without fancy plugins does just what i want.

[dazadaza]

Hmm, dont know if i read your reply correctly but you have your media library in two locations, with manual syncronization? Yeah, that sound labor intensive Well, if it works

I have a NAS and access my media via NFS.

I think Im going to go with option 2, keep my tvshow.nfos with the episodeguideurl-tag, and add new episodes without NFOs. And then keep updating the NFOs after hand with EMM, so there is local art/info the next time the DB needs to get rebuilt

However, I seem to have some problems... XBMC seems to accept my episodeguide-tag, and add episodes without NFOs, BUT if I add some(these gets inserted) and then add some more to the same series/season, these are not picked up I can see in the debug-log that whatchdog sees theese additions, but XBMS doesnt start to scan..

I believe I saw some setting in the watchdog configuration, something force global scan... Will try that later, hope that fixes it

/Daniel