2020-12-29, 06:24
Hello everyone and thanks for having me here. 
After years of accessing all my video content via Kodi's file browser, I'm currently trying to get everything scraped and indexed so I can take full advantage of the actual videos/movies menu: Looks so much nicer, and I can't wait to find out who my favorite actors/directors are.
I'm fully aware that Kodi can't read my mind, so I'm also aware that it's up to me to name and structure my video files in a way that Kodi will be able to figure out. Most of my files are movies, and my file tree is structured in a way that each movie resides in a separate folder AND is also named appropriately - so it would seem that, for scraping, using folder names OR the actual file names would work fine. In preparation, I've also named all folders AND file names to include both the film name and the year it came out.
Which brings me to my first problem (of three): When scraping blockbusters like "Crash" (three-time academy award winner) or "Big Fish" the default scraper chooses other movies that I never heard of before. I could probably get around this by adding .nfo tags to all folders, but that's a ton of work and before I go there, I'd like to discover if/why it's really necessary. Naming a file "Big Fish (2003)" is already as accurate as it gets, and I don't understand why the scraper goes off to choose a film called "Reel Big Fish" instead when that's not actually the file name. Similarly, it would be great if I could get the scraper to automatically add the movie "Crash" when that's the name of the file, instead of picking a lesser-known film that only has the word "Crash" somewhere in the title.
The other problems I have are content-related, and I'd be happy to get some advice how I'm supposed to name/organize my content so scraping works flawlessly.
#1 I have several copies from DVDs that are not actual movies, but (animated) short film collections. Would I have to separate those from my movies and put them into an entirely different folder so they can be treated as TV shows, or is there a better way to handle them? If I had the choice, I'd prefer to keep them in the movie section (with a folder icon I can click on to access the episodes on the next screen), but if that's not possible, I understand.
#2 The biggest problems come from my "DOCUMENTARIES" folder that is currently a sub-folder of "MOVIES". That folder has categories like "Sports" or "Nature" with a vast array of films sitting underneath (sometimes with sub-categories). Some of those are full-feature documentaries, and I kinda like that they show up among the (other) movies, but there's also a bunch of rare documentaries inbetween that are not even in the movie database. That wouldn't be a problem if the scraper would just admit it didn't find anything (possibly just adding the original title and a screenshot to the database?), but since the scraper is just so generous to find SOMETHING, I end up with lots of wrong entries in the db (i.e. a huge mess).
So if there's some advice how I should handle this, I'd be really grateful. I'd rather not end up doing lots of manual edits to the database (I've been there before, but lost it all soon after as I had to delete the db) - anything that would survive a re-scrape/reinstall would be preferrable.
Many thanks in advance!
After years of accessing all my video content via Kodi's file browser, I'm currently trying to get everything scraped and indexed so I can take full advantage of the actual videos/movies menu: Looks so much nicer, and I can't wait to find out who my favorite actors/directors are.
I'm fully aware that Kodi can't read my mind, so I'm also aware that it's up to me to name and structure my video files in a way that Kodi will be able to figure out. Most of my files are movies, and my file tree is structured in a way that each movie resides in a separate folder AND is also named appropriately - so it would seem that, for scraping, using folder names OR the actual file names would work fine. In preparation, I've also named all folders AND file names to include both the film name and the year it came out.
Which brings me to my first problem (of three): When scraping blockbusters like "Crash" (three-time academy award winner) or "Big Fish" the default scraper chooses other movies that I never heard of before. I could probably get around this by adding .nfo tags to all folders, but that's a ton of work and before I go there, I'd like to discover if/why it's really necessary. Naming a file "Big Fish (2003)" is already as accurate as it gets, and I don't understand why the scraper goes off to choose a film called "Reel Big Fish" instead when that's not actually the file name. Similarly, it would be great if I could get the scraper to automatically add the movie "Crash" when that's the name of the file, instead of picking a lesser-known film that only has the word "Crash" somewhere in the title.
The other problems I have are content-related, and I'd be happy to get some advice how I'm supposed to name/organize my content so scraping works flawlessly.
#1 I have several copies from DVDs that are not actual movies, but (animated) short film collections. Would I have to separate those from my movies and put them into an entirely different folder so they can be treated as TV shows, or is there a better way to handle them? If I had the choice, I'd prefer to keep them in the movie section (with a folder icon I can click on to access the episodes on the next screen), but if that's not possible, I understand.
#2 The biggest problems come from my "DOCUMENTARIES" folder that is currently a sub-folder of "MOVIES". That folder has categories like "Sports" or "Nature" with a vast array of films sitting underneath (sometimes with sub-categories). Some of those are full-feature documentaries, and I kinda like that they show up among the (other) movies, but there's also a bunch of rare documentaries inbetween that are not even in the movie database. That wouldn't be a problem if the scraper would just admit it didn't find anything (possibly just adding the original title and a screenshot to the database?), but since the scraper is just so generous to find SOMETHING, I end up with lots of wrong entries in the db (i.e. a huge mess).
So if there's some advice how I should handle this, I'd be really grateful. I'd rather not end up doing lots of manual edits to the database (I've been there before, but lost it all soon after as I had to delete the db) - anything that would survive a re-scrape/reinstall would be preferrable.
Many thanks in advance!
