2014-05-20, 19:02
Hi Folks,
Apologies if this is not in the correct forum - mods please move if need be.
Not quite a noob as last time I used xbmc was about 2009 I think, but this has really moved on some.
Just getting back into xbmc now having been using a WD-TV Live for the past few years. Still like the WD product but it is getting a bit long in the tooth and I've recently been having some hardware issues with it.
Ebuyer had a deal on so I picked up a Gigabyte Brix gb-xm12-3227 with 4G RAM thrown in and I grabbed a 64G mSSD from Dabs.
Installed xbmcbuntu and it runs pretty well on this hardware.
XBMC picked up most of the video content from my NAS drive and all my music on my Autonomic MMS-2.
Video playback was a bit glitchy at first on some .mkv's - a quick google & turned off HW acceleration & everything is sweet.
Had the whole thing up and running in about 15 minutes.
I have full control using iPad, Android (Nexus 5) & Crestron automation.
I'm very impressed so far with XBMC & the Brix combo. My only gripe with the Brix is the fan is a tad noisy under load even with the latest BIOS (which addressed fan noise)
The iPad xbmcRemote is a joy to use.
As usual the Android version is the poor relation - although functional it lacks the flair and elegance of the iOS version.
Crestron integration works well.
I have had a few growing pains with the scrapers, mainly having to adapt the naming of some TV shows to get the scraper to work.
e.g Tom and Jerry Golden Collection and a few others. I have now ironed those issues and the scraper works well.
My content is organised:
Family Movies
Family TV Shows
Adult Movies
Adult TV Shows
Family Videos
Pictures
Music
I have now set up 3 profiles:
Master user - admin pin access only
'Kids' - with no pin & access to child only content, family videos & music
'Not Kids' - pin access to all content
The only question I have at this stage is regarding content that does not appear on TMDB & TheTVDB.
I have quite a few kids DVD's that do not show up because they are not in the on-line databases. I also have a few family videos that I would like to show up as well.
For the WD-TV, I simply provided the following and my content would appear in the Media Library:
Create a dedicated folder - for instance 'Legoland Mar09'
Within this folder:
* An image file called folder.jpg - which would display at the folder level
* Video file (mp4 or mkv) lets call it Legoland.mp4
* An image file called Legoland.jpg
* An XML file called Legoland.xml
The WD would then scrape the info from the XML to display synopses etc and the Legoland.jpg would show cover art.
I realise I can play this content through the file manager but I would like to enquire if there is a way to scrape the XML and have it appear in the Movies or TV show view.
How feasible is it to build a custom scraper for instance that can be pointed at a media folder and parse the XML files or is there already a way to do this?
Apologies for the lengthy post and if this question has undoubtably been asked already.
Regards
slip
Apologies if this is not in the correct forum - mods please move if need be.
Not quite a noob as last time I used xbmc was about 2009 I think, but this has really moved on some.
Just getting back into xbmc now having been using a WD-TV Live for the past few years. Still like the WD product but it is getting a bit long in the tooth and I've recently been having some hardware issues with it.
Ebuyer had a deal on so I picked up a Gigabyte Brix gb-xm12-3227 with 4G RAM thrown in and I grabbed a 64G mSSD from Dabs.
Installed xbmcbuntu and it runs pretty well on this hardware.
XBMC picked up most of the video content from my NAS drive and all my music on my Autonomic MMS-2.
Video playback was a bit glitchy at first on some .mkv's - a quick google & turned off HW acceleration & everything is sweet.
Had the whole thing up and running in about 15 minutes.
I have full control using iPad, Android (Nexus 5) & Crestron automation.
I'm very impressed so far with XBMC & the Brix combo. My only gripe with the Brix is the fan is a tad noisy under load even with the latest BIOS (which addressed fan noise)
The iPad xbmcRemote is a joy to use.
As usual the Android version is the poor relation - although functional it lacks the flair and elegance of the iOS version.
Crestron integration works well.
I have had a few growing pains with the scrapers, mainly having to adapt the naming of some TV shows to get the scraper to work.
e.g Tom and Jerry Golden Collection and a few others. I have now ironed those issues and the scraper works well.
My content is organised:
Family Movies
Family TV Shows
Adult Movies
Adult TV Shows
Family Videos
Pictures
Music
I have now set up 3 profiles:
Master user - admin pin access only
'Kids' - with no pin & access to child only content, family videos & music
'Not Kids' - pin access to all content
The only question I have at this stage is regarding content that does not appear on TMDB & TheTVDB.
I have quite a few kids DVD's that do not show up because they are not in the on-line databases. I also have a few family videos that I would like to show up as well.
For the WD-TV, I simply provided the following and my content would appear in the Media Library:
Create a dedicated folder - for instance 'Legoland Mar09'
Within this folder:
* An image file called folder.jpg - which would display at the folder level
* Video file (mp4 or mkv) lets call it Legoland.mp4
* An image file called Legoland.jpg
* An XML file called Legoland.xml
The WD would then scrape the info from the XML to display synopses etc and the Legoland.jpg would show cover art.
I realise I can play this content through the file manager but I would like to enquire if there is a way to scrape the XML and have it appear in the Movies or TV show view.
How feasible is it to build a custom scraper for instance that can be pointed at a media folder and parse the XML files or is there already a way to do this?
Apologies for the lengthy post and if this question has undoubtably been asked already.
Regards
slip
