[GJones]

I was irritated the other day with the lack of luck in finding good information from music video scraping. I do not blame the authors of the current plugin but the information sources themselves. Often videos for old songs get listed with a very recent date. This is presumably due to the videos being released on the site at that time.

I wonder if I would be happier (and maybe others) by retasking the guts of an allmusic scraper for video information. To me, most music videos are 98% music and 2% video as far as catalog information. If I have a strange concert video from a concert 27 years after the release of the single, I'll build my own NFO. But predominantly, I want the info on the video to match the video for the single release. This would also help in terms of matching up videos from the same artist/group.

I welcome comments and snide remarks before I dive into this coding project.

[spoco2]

Well, I just got around to throwing a small collection of music videos onto my xbmc share and was surprised by how very, very poorly the scraper did at picking up the vast majority of them. So yeah, a new scraper would be awesome.

[marx]

If I have a strange concert video from a concert 27 years after the release of the single, I'll build my own NFO. But predominantly, I want the info on the video to match the video for the single release. This would also help in terms of matching up videos from the same artist/group.

Dude, first of all, how did you do this?
I'm trying to get my Concerts listed in any kind of library, with no lucky.

Tried to set the content folder to Music Video, Video, None, MTV scrapper, Yahoo Music scrapper. But nothing seems to works nice.

Tried also to create smart playlists, but it seems if the files are not in a library, the playlist can't match they.

[GJones]

I used the information in the wiki (look up music video nfo) and manually created an NFO file with the same name as the video file but with a .nfo file extension. Then I updated the library (because the file was in a folder with content set as music video) and it files it with all the information I filled out in the NFO.

[Suven]

In most cases it only seems not to work but when youre in filemanager and go to any musicvideo and click I for Info you will notice that it is just a lack of information on MTV-/Yahoo-Side.

I added my music-videos manually the I-way.

Does anyone know if there exist better sources?

If not, why shouldn't we start a community-project for this? I have experience in database-design and web-development but would need help with the xbmc-scraper itself.

What info about musicvideos do we expect?

• Musicvideos artist
  
• Original (song)-artist
  
• Year
  
• First aired
  
• Director
  
• Songs title
  
• Musicvideos title
  
• Backgroundinfo (something like what plot is for movies)
  
• director
  

I'm dividing the artist of the musicvideo and song because of things like this: http://vimeo.com/1612411

But wouldn't it be enough to download the simple trackinfo like we do with regular music? In the as-is-status of xbmc I don't see any benefits from using MTV and Yahoo..

[acidbaby]

In the last version of XBMC you could add a folder of videos as a Music Video source and not use a scraper at all. They would all show up in a list by file name and still have all of the Music video type functionality.

Is there a way to force Dharma to not use a scraper and just make a list of the contents like it did previously?

Is it possible to create a scraper that creates nfo just from the file name to mimc the no scrapper method or do they require a web service?

[Vampirebat]

im currently in the process of creating Nfos and getting/making fanart for my music video collection of roughly 2000 videos...i have found a few programs to make this easier (batch renamers/ batch text editors/ bulk image downloaders)
but still a very long and painful process and im only about a third of the way done.
if someone were to make a decent scrapable DB site for Music Video data and fan art i can contribute whatever i have.
i have found a few half decent sites for data to fill in nfos manually but they weren't really scraper friendly or would have "tried" to make/modify a scraper for them.

[czfj5r]

I also have a lot of music videos lingering about and the scraper is not doing what it should do, or rather - the sources seem to be poor. So a new scraper would be fantastic and alternative would be to get some ind of tool (like media companion) to manage the nfo files for easier scraping in XBMC...

@Vampirebat: What tools have you found useful so far?
My files are structured in folders and filenames are "artist - song title". If I could at least get a tool that batch created the nfo from the information only that would be awesome so they could get into teh library at least...

[Suven]

I really would like to create such a new scraper-friendly website!

I have unused webspace and a domain and was searching for a good new project.

Which infos should musicvideos have? What kind of fanarts do you use? Artist-Fanarts and musicVideo-Posters?

[Vampirebat]

What tools have you found useful so far?

http://bulkimagedownloader.com/bid/downl...ownloader/
for mass image downloading...obviously you have to find websites that have alot of images you can use.
http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptdirprn.asp
to create a list of all my music videos...which are all re-encoded as mp4s using the same codecs so i can use the same stream info in my Nfos.
after that i then edited the list of music video files i created with "directory printer" with the text replace functions in notepad to remove all the stuff i dont need and to add "-fanart.jpg" tag to the end of each line.
i found a program that would rename all my fan art based off this text based list but the trial version only allowed you to test it out on 10 files...which worked but i wasnt willing to trust creator with my credit card info so ive been editing them by hand off this list.
to create basic nfos i used a program i found in this link http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=36167
which created and filled in nfo info for artist and track title and then i used
a mass text editor to add the rest of the info to the Nfos.

My files are structured in folders and filenames are "artist - song title". If I could at least get a tool that batch created the nfo from the information only that would be awesome so they could get into teh library at least...

that is the same file structure i use.
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=36167 will work to get basic nfo files but you may need to do some editing to add in stuff like album name and year or whatever.

[Vampirebat]

Which infos should musicvideos have?

im not sure what info others actually use.
personally all i bother with are these... and stream details when im editing my Nfos for music videos.
<title></title>
<year></year>
<album></album>
<outline></outline>
<runtime></runtime>
<mpaa></mpaa>
<director></director>
<premiered></premiered>
<aired></aired>
<studio></studio>
<artist></artist>

What kind of fanarts do you use? Artist-Fanarts and musicVideo-Posters?

the way im setting it up may not be proper.
i have all my music videos in the same folder
Music Videos/
artist-song name.mp4
artist-song name.nfo
artist-song name-fanart.jpg

same format and folder for all videos.
however what im finding is that the first fanart for each artist listed in alphabetical order is used for all videos by that artist in library mode.
once they are queued into a playlist they show each individual fanart for various different tracks on the now playing list but in the library they only use the first one in the list by an artist.

[czfj5r]

http://bulkimagedownloader.com/bid/downl...ownloader/
for mass image downloading...obviously you have to find websites that have alot of images you can use.
http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptdirprn.asp
to create a list of all my music videos...which are all re-encoded as mp4s using the same codecs so i can use the same stream info in my Nfos.
after that i then edited the list of music video files i created with "directory printer" with the text replace functions in notepad to remove all the stuff i dont need and to add "-fanart.jpg" tag to the end of each line.
i found a program that would rename all my fan art based off this text based list but the trial version only allowed you to test it out on 10 files...which worked but i wasnt willing to trust creator with my credit card info so ive been editing them by hand off this list.
to create basic nfos i used a program i found in this link http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=36167
which created and filled in nfo info for artist and track title and then i used
a mass text editor to add the rest of the info to the Nfos.

that is the same file structure i use.
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=36167 will work to get basic nfo files but you may need to do some editing to add in stuff like album name and year or whatever.

Many, many thanks! You made my day & week

[mephistopoa]

strange, without a nfo xmbc here doesn't even enable the menu music vids

When I add some info in the nfo, then using the song name I can play it but if browsing using the artist name, it doesn't list the file under the artist name...

very poorly implemented the music vid function on xbmc

[mephistopoa]

In the last version of XBMC you could add a folder of videos as a Music Video source and not use a scraper at all. They would all show up in a list by file name and still have all of the Music video type functionality.

Is there a way to force Dharma to not use a scraper and just make a list of the contents like it did previously?

Is it possible to create a scraper that creates nfo just from the file name to mimc the no scrapper method or do they require a web service?

well, it doesn't work like that in real life I'm afraid

[mephistopoa]

well I've tried one mtv alternative scrapper but nothing so far, quite frustrating ;/