[jayratt]

Hey Everyone,

I'm trying to wean my wife off MCE (XP and Vista) and onto XBMC, so I'm trying to make it easy for her. Biggest issue so far is getting XBMC to understand our TV shows properly, and I'm hoping there's somebody else out there who's made this work. I'm running XBMC on a Vista Ultimate PC if that makes any difference, and the source for the TV shows is my XP MCE box using the standard "Recorded TV". Note that these are recorded shows, not downloaded ones, so the filename is set by MCE and not the same as what you'd expect for downloaded content.

Basically, MCE names the file in the format:

<tv show>_<tv station>_<date and time>

I realize I won't be able to pull season and episode information from this unless the scrapers can determine this from the date, but I'm hoping at least I can categorize all shows together and give her an easier way to find them rather than cryptic (to her) filenames.

Anybody done this before? I'm assuming it's going to start with a proper regex expression but I'm new to that as well, and unlike google where I can rapid-fire different search terms until I figure out the right one, I'm limited to one every 20 seconds here

Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated -- Meanwhile I'll keep searching

Thx

J

[Rhico]

Hi,
I'm also thinking to move from XP MCE to XBMC but I don't want to give up recording. So I was thinking to keep using the build-in recording functionality of XP MCE, but view it with the XBMC for windows interface (or the linux variant and stream it from my windows PC).

Did you manage it to read the show information in a descent way into XBMC?

Regards,
Rhico

[joshuass]

Well it depends on if the scraper can scrape using an air date and not the episode number.

That could be problematic because if you don't record on the first air date, then MCE is going name it with the wrong date and the scraper will not give you the right episode information.

TV station isn't going to matter much.

And again it all depends on if the scraper supports scraping by air date and not just name and episode number.

It may just be easier to write a script to rename your recorded shows sequentially by giving it a name and starting episode number. I did this with python. Basically I tell it to rename all video files <Name>.S<season #>E<episode #>.<file extension>, iterating the episode number for each file.

This worked pretty good to get my files in order when I first transitioned to XBMC.

[harbingerofdoom]

having never run MCE, i have to ask, isnt there a way to get it to name your shows s00e00 where s is season and e is episode and then just increment from there? if so that would solve your problems since you wouldnt have any problem scraping.