[djmesh]

To make a long story short, I've decided to give xbmc a run as my main htpc software after a long stint with boxee, because the team @ boxee is unable to develop their non-boxee box versions anymore (due to lack of resources). So far, I'm really impressed, and its magnitudes less buggy than the beta version of boxee.

Anyway, I've got the latest Dharma 10.1 on my windows 7 htpc installed and up and running, with most of my movies and tv shows added, but there are a few things I'm really having trouble figuring out.

Note: I have done a crap-ton of reading on the forums and wiki, but to be honest, everything is a bit overwhelming.

1. How can I browse and manually select files to watch that are not scraped / will not ever be properly scraped, (like the latest soccer games, or sports)? I don't want to have to worry about properly naming items like these just to watch the game from last weekend. Boxee has a very easy to use file browser. I can't seem to find this feature on my xbmc setup.

2. Boxee has a feature for viewing files that could not be scraped / identified through the automated process, and provided a easy way to resolve these unidentified files and identify them, adding them to the library. I've read all about proper naming and structure with xbmc, but I'm curious if there is anything similar that will do this for xbmc?

3. I see there are several tools for managing your library, art, info, etc, is there one that is used by a majority of users? Is there one that you like more than another?

Thanks and sorry for the hassle.

[spiff]

1) the video section has two views, library mode and file view. you can toggle in the lhs menu.
2) that's unfortunately missing. we're working on it for eden
3) i never used a yafne and never felt the need.

[djmesh]

1) the video section has two views, library mode and file view. you can toggle in the lhs menu.
2) that's unfortunately missing. we're working on it for eden
3) i never used a yafne and never felt the need.

Thanks for the info,

I've sort of got file view working, but I'm going to need to do some reading / tweaking to get the sports stuff I want to watch to show correctly, as xbmc seems to the shortening / guessing at folder names for most of my sports stuff. For instance, all my English Premier League soccer games are in generic EPL 2010 or EPL 2011 folders, so i have no way to tell which game is which without going into each folder. Maybe this can be resolved via sadbnzb's file handling rules.

I also noticed a "manually add to library" option while playing around in file view mode, I'll need to do some reading up on how this works.

-Thanks

[natethomas]

If you're using sabnzbdzbnzbbznd (or however you spell it), I'd strongly recommend Sickbeard for TV shows. I don't know if sickbeard handles sports any better than XBMC, but it is REALLY good at dealing with television.

[Robotica]

Regarding point 2: There is an addon for that: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=90258

[seand]

There are apps various XBMC users for bulk scraping of files. I generally use the right-click to manually rescrape folders. Also rather than a third party to identify films and genrate nfo's I like using XBMC's own "Export Library to Individual Files" in the system settings to save individual nfo's for each video in the individual folder with the video files. Hugely speeds up the process of rebuilding your library or adding it to another HTPC machine later on.

As pointed out earlier sickbeard for TV, i.e. serial programming is pure genius at not just managing downloading but managing file names, series and episode fan art, the whole nine, in an extremely automated fashion.

[djmesh]

Hey guys,

Thanks again for all the feedback, tips and guidance. It's really, seriously appreciated. I'm going to go checkout sick-beard and missing movie viewer. They sound like they would make the experience that much easier.

-djmesh