2021-07-10, 20:57
I am trying to add the restored version of Abel Gance's Napoleon to my Kodi library. This thing comes in three parts on 3 blu-rays and the film sections are named Napoleon Act 1, Napoleon Act 2 and 3, Napoleon Act 4. In theory I could munge them together into one 5.5 hour epic but it is rather more convenient to have them in usable parts. To add to the confusion there are actually two different versions Act 4 so if I merge the parts I end up with 2 5.5 hour films and space also starts to become an issue.
I can rip the metadata for the whole film from TMDB but that assumes it is one complete film whereas it is closer in structure to a TV Miniseries. I can see two possible alternative approaches:
Scrape the film using one part. Export the metadata to an nfo. Clone the nfo with changed names to create 4 separately named movies, import the changed metadata from the .nfos, create a Napoleon movie set to keep the parts together.
Scrape the film using one part. Export the metadata to an nfo. Using a miniseries as a template craft episode .nfos for the parts. Move the "episodes" into a TV Series name Napoleon and import the metadata there.
The former method is, I think, simpler and less error prome (I claim no special expertise in .nfo editing) but the requirement for a movie set seems rather clunky. The latter method is more elegant but I end up with a film in with the TV Series which might cause me issues later if I forget myself during a library clean-up.
Digging around I found something called "stacking" but if I read it right I would still end up with a monolithic 5.5 hour film and it wasn't clear to me if I could use the same parts in more than one stack to get the version with the alternate ending without having to duplicate the whole film.
Ideas, comments and suggestions would be very much appreciated. The final fallback is to only watch this from a standalone bluray player but that does limit my options somewhat.
I can rip the metadata for the whole film from TMDB but that assumes it is one complete film whereas it is closer in structure to a TV Miniseries. I can see two possible alternative approaches:
Scrape the film using one part. Export the metadata to an nfo. Clone the nfo with changed names to create 4 separately named movies, import the changed metadata from the .nfos, create a Napoleon movie set to keep the parts together.
Scrape the film using one part. Export the metadata to an nfo. Using a miniseries as a template craft episode .nfos for the parts. Move the "episodes" into a TV Series name Napoleon and import the metadata there.
The former method is, I think, simpler and less error prome (I claim no special expertise in .nfo editing) but the requirement for a movie set seems rather clunky. The latter method is more elegant but I end up with a film in with the TV Series which might cause me issues later if I forget myself during a library clean-up.
Digging around I found something called "stacking" but if I read it right I would still end up with a monolithic 5.5 hour film and it wasn't clear to me if I could use the same parts in more than one stack to get the version with the alternate ending without having to duplicate the whole film.
Ideas, comments and suggestions would be very much appreciated. The final fallback is to only watch this from a standalone bluray player but that does limit my options somewhat.
