[not4smurf]

Hi,

I've been using XBMC for years and love it. It's so good that even though I have been using it for years I have only just now decided to register for the forums because I need help. Up until now everything has just worked :-)

I have a library of TV Shows on a NAS exported read-only using NFS. I really don't want to rename the files.

Almost all of them scrape perfectly but I have a few that do not. One, for example, I see it in my library as the correct show, but also as "God's Quiz". It also used to appear as "Answer Me '94" or something like that, but does not any more. I've done lots of searching and the resolution in each case seems to be to rename the files.

My reading of the XBMC Wiki regarding NFO files suggests that I should be able to override the default scraper behavior with .nfo, but this does not seem to work. Do I have to rename them??

The show is structured like this:

TV Shows/[long descriptive name]/
TV Shows/[long descriptive name].nfo
TV Shows/[long descriptive name]/Season 1/
TV Shows/[long descriptive name]/Season 1.nfo
TV Shows/[long descriptive name]/Season 1/[short name].s01.e01.m4v
TV Shows/[long descriptive name]/Season 1/[short name].s01.e02.m4v
...
TV Shows/[long descriptive name]/Season 2/
TV Shows/[long descriptive name]/Season 2.nfo
TV Shows/[long descriptive name]/Season 2/[short name].s02.e01.m4v
TV Shows/[long descriptive name]/Season 2/[short name].s02.e02.m4v
...

The top level .nfo files contain a single line with the URL of thetvdb.com series page. Each of the series .nfo files contain a single line with the URL of thetvdb.com season page.

Each time I try to fix with .nfo file changes etc. I remove God's Quiz from my library, refresh library and it comes back :-(

The other shows that are causing problems are (I believe similar) and I am confident I can apply whatever I learn from this example to fix them as well.

Edit - I lied, using SMB, not NFS but don't think it is relevant.
Edit 2 - pastebin of debug log from scan http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=YLN3zC3d

[Milhouse]

Your nfos are named incorrectly. Your "top level" nfo should be called "tvshow.nfo" (exactly that, don't include the name of the show) and should be in the root of the show folder.

I see no reason to for the "Season X.nfo" files once you have a working tvshow.nfo and correctly structured "Season X" folders.

Also it probably doesn't help that you switch between "long descriptive name" and "short name" - be consistent, use one or the other. Ideally the name you use should match that on thetvdb.com.

For example, if the TV show folder is "The Mentalist" then a full episode path would be:

/tvshows/The Mentalist/Season 1/The Mentalist S01E01.mkv

From my own experience, "Gods Quiz" will be scraped when XBMC has no idea what show it is scraping.

[un1versal]

Dont use years on tvshow filenames if these arent a remake/diff show, years should be used only on the newer iteration is also present.

For instance The correct is Rome, not Rome 2005, IF you had Rome 2012 (yes I know its not same show or remake) then you would name that Rome 2012, same if you have both... Many many ppl have non matches because they use the year on tvshow (year) incorrectly.

The year is a helper in case of remake/diff show at later date where the remake/different shows is the one that should have the year in name.

See http://thetvdb.com/?string=Rome&searchse...ion=Search for e.g. Only one real Match for Rome and Rome 2012, there is no Rome 2005 at all.

[not4smurf]

Thank you both for your reply. I don't seem to have been clear enough in my original post - I CAN'T rename the files. Happy to go into the reasons offline if you really want to know.

My question is more theoretical, and really very simple - is it possible to override bad file naming with a NFO file, or is there a certain basic minimum standard that file names must adhere to?

The opening paragraph of the Wiki page on NFO files says " In particular they are helpful if the information fetched from a web site does not match the video file" - this is exactly my situation: fetched information for God's Quiz does not match video files for Rome.

Thanks MilhouseVH for pointing out that my NFO file had the wrong name, but even after fix this I have the same problem: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=7m3nDDPf

TL;DR - NFO file not found, scans for "Season 2" which matches "God's Quiz"...

[Milhouse]

Yes, XBMC requires a minimum standard for file naming which you're not meeting. A little surprised it failed to find tvshow.nfo but given the name of the directory maybe the scanner mistakenly thought it was dealing with an episode rather than an entire show so wasn't looking for tvshow.nfo.

Bottom line, if you can't/won't rename your files to something a little saner and closer to what XBMC requires, your pretty much stuffed, basically.

[not4smurf]

Turns out I have some database issues... I seem to have previously manually added both seasons to the library via the Files interface. This seems to have created entries in the "path" table that survive later removal of the show from the database. So, each time I updated my library it found the show in the show root directory and each of the seasons. I couldn't find a way to remove these redundant "path" entries via the GUI so manually deleted them from the database. This caused me to be unable to remove the bogus shows (God's Quiz et. al.) via the GUI so I deleted them from "tvshow" table. Now when I update the library it finds my tvshow.nfo, correctly scrapes the show and does not wrongly match the individual seasons to bogus shows.

Here's hoping I have not left too many hanging links etc. in the database by manually deleting rows :-)

Thanks again.