[dracula]

I have this movie "The Animatrix", which consists of 9 video files, one file per chapter.

What is the recommended way to get this recognized and played as a single movie?

Several observations:

• Scanning/scraping is one issue: I don't want to have 'The Animatrix' 9 times in my library
  
• Do nfo's work for movies at all? I followed the wiki and tried 'movie.nfo', 'The Animatrix.nfo', 'The Animatrix (2003).nfo', but the logs keeps saying "NFO not found". In the nfo I put the url to the tmdb page.
  
• I placed "The Animatrix.mkv" (1Mb) in the same directory, which is nothing more than a container for the individual chapter references. If I open this in Media Player Classic (or WMP), it properly plays the full 1,5 hour movie, but XBMC just stops immediately. Using this 'all-in-one' mkv, at least it allows me to get only a single entry in my library, so it seems a step in the good direction.
  

The same applies to "Nightmares & Dreamscapes", which has 8 'episodes'.

[romwarrior]

Did you read the wiki for movie sets??

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Movie_sets

[dracula]

Yeah, also considered making a set, but there's two issues with that:
1. It requires an .nfo file, which is still unrecognized.
2. The Animatrix is already part of 'The Matrix Collection', and I thought with sets within sets I would be pushing my luck...

[thrak76]

You can use stacking.

Animatrix (disc 1).mkv
Animatrix (disc 2).mkv
Animatrix (disc 3).mkv
etc...

The library will only show the first entry, and then stack the rest of them. You won't need to create an .nfo for this to work either. When you export your library, xbmc will create an .nfo for the first file in the stack (in the case above, disc 1), and all the other files in the stack will use that .nfo.

[dracula]

Thanks, stacking worked after some file renaming, and it's exactly the library result I was after.

Unfortunately, the chapter information seems completely lost within a stacked movie, so it's impossible to jump to a particular chapter/episode. Also bit unhappy about the crippled filenames, which have now lost the episode titles in order to get recognized.

[thrak76]

Thanks, stacking worked after some file renaming, and it's exactly the library result I was after.

Unfortunately, the chapter information seems completely lost within a stacked movie, so it's impossible to jump to a particular chapter/episode. Also bit unhappy about the crippled filenames, which have now lost the episode titles in order to get recognized.

Chapter markers should not be affected. Something else seems to be amiss. I've plenty of stacked movies with chapters intact.

As far as the filenames, yeah I think you may be out of luck. You could possibly rename the first file within XBMC (with the context menu), but since all the others are stacked behind it; it doesn't do much good. Maybe someone else has an idea...

[dracula]

I assume with "Chapter markers" you're referring to manually created bookmarks? I haven't tried that, but I think it could be a nice work-around.

It would be quite nice if it had created bookmarks to each of the episodes within a stacked movie, so that it's still possible to quickly navigate to the individual episodes while still only taking one entry in the library.

In my case, it would stack the 9 files into one library entry "The Animatrix", and create 9 bookmarks, one to the start of each file within the stacked movie.

Thanks for your replies.

[thrak76]

I assume with "Chapter markers" you're referring to manually created bookmarks? I haven't tried that, but I think it could be a nice work-around.

It would be quite nice if it had created bookmarks to each of the episodes within a stacked movie, so that it's still possible to quickly navigate to the individual episodes while still only taking one entry in the library.

In my case, it would stack the 9 files into one library entry "The Animatrix", and create 9 bookmarks, one to the start of each file within the stacked movie.

Thanks for your replies.

No, i mean the actual chapters. I only have a few cases of stacked movies (more concerts), and in each case the chapters were left intact. I can still use the up/down arrows to move between the chapters.

But creating the bookmarks would be a good solution for selecting the individual episodes. Depending on your skin, you may even be shown a whole list of your bookmarks with thumbnails. And if you time your bookmarks at just the right time, you'll have a fairly good representation of the episode (like a Title for instance). I don't think you can rename the bookmarks to show anything but just the time index.