Jump to content

XBMC Support - Some questions..


Ethyria

Recommended Posts

Hi All,

 

Long time XBMC user here, looking to make the switch to MB Server for my Metadata management. I just had a few questions. I've done a search on the forums but couldn't find a specific answer to the below, apologies if I missed it:

 

1) I have been using Metabrowser to manage local metadata for XBMC, but I am keen to make the switch. I use season fanart (in the format of season01-fanart.jpg, season02-fanart.jpg etc) and noticed that MB Server doesn't yet provide the ability to scrape Season fanart. Is this a feature that is being considered?

 

2) I have noticed that Music nfo's created by MB Server aren't supported by XBMC yet, they appear to be in a different format to the format required by XBMC, is this a feature in the works?

 

3) My multi disc albums are in the structure of: Music -> Aritist -> Album ->  CD1 , CD2 -> Tracks  When scanned to MB Server, it detects the multiple cd's as inidividual albums (although the tags are set to Disc 1, Disc 2 etc). Is support for this structure on the books or do you recommend a different folder structure?

 

4) Is it possible to tell MB Server to ignore a certain type of missing metadata, eg. local Trailers or have it hide the notification icon beside the movie/show?

      

5) Is support for the XBMC '.Actors' folder planned or is it possible to hide these from MB Server so they are not visible under each show / movie?

 

Sorry for the amount of questions but myself and quite a few others over on the XBMC boards are very keen to find out the above. Plus the support for music scraping has alot of us VERY excited, thanks again for all your hard work.

Edited by Ethyria
Link to comment
Share on other sites

sfnetwork

1) http://mediabrowser.tv/community/index.php?/topic/1627-xbmc-metadata-saver-plugin/ This should be a good start on the structure it creates for XBMC. As for season, it will automatically fetch based on the TV show (like MetaBrowser) and will also let you manually browse online (TVDB and fanart sources)

2013-11-08%209-09-36%20PM.png

2013-11-08%209-09-05%20PM.png

 

 

It will follow this standard (which is the simplest and best for Frodo from all my tests)

2013-10-16%202-26-53%20PM.png

 

2) Luke is actively working right now on that part (generating the album and artist nfos that should be able to point on images and contain metadata.

 

5) Actors are already working for XBMC, using the IBN structure (NFO has each path in it). Not sure the other way is planned and I wouldn't recommend it personally (better to centralize actors in IBN IMO)

 

Hope this helps (for what I could answer)

 

***Only things still missing at this stage (if comparing to dedicated tools like MetaBrowser):

-Renaming (including control on convention with variable, etc...)

-Batch processing

(yeah, I took the opportunity to make a feature request lol  :ph34r: )

Edited by sfnetwork
Link to comment
Share on other sites

What is the .actors folder? If you can get me information on it I'll make sure for the next server release that it's not recognized as media content.

 

Then later after that we can actually add support to utilize it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

steve1977

What is the .actors folder? If you can get me information on it I'll make sure for the next server release that it's not recognized as media content.

 

Then later after that we can actually add support to utilize it.

 

There are three ways that XBMC recognizes actor thumbs:

 

1) Just scraping it based on the IMDB ID

2) Scraping from link in NFO

3) Manual download of the actor thumb and place it into the folder ".actors" within each movie folder

 

Manual actor download would not  be on my priority list for MBS, but playing a link in the NFO would be nice. But that's just me and there will be other opinions around.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

sfnetwork

Actor thumbnails

You can add actor thumbnails to any movie or TV show by adding an '.actors' folder in the corresponding movie / TV show / Episode directory. You may need to use the command line to create this directory in Windows.
The folder can then contain actor images using the following naming convention:

Videos\path\.actors\actor_name.tbn (spaces replaced with underscores)

Edited by sfnetwork
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ok, thanks. We'll have to make sure to ignore that so that we aren't displaying folders everywhere.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks very much for the quick replies, very much appreciated.

 

SFNetwork beat me to the punch with the .actors folder response, the only change is that they are JPG now with the depreciation of TBN files. The only benefit to the .actors folder is that the actors / cast pictures can be of the actor in character and age relevant to the series / movie. So not a big issue.

 

If they can be hidden from view in the MB Server though that would be just as good.

 

Again, thanks all for the quick repsonses.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

sfnetwork

Yea I think that's a cool feature with the per-movie actor images.

I don't know... this could get messy having the same actor image in different folders (like Bruce Willis,etc...) and it has to have the "person.nfo" on top of it.. (BTW, do the saver do this part? never checked)

I just think the IBN\people is more structured, centralized and easier to manage...

 

Of course, I agree that MBS should ignore the ".actor" folders and support reading this structure.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yea I think that's a cool feature with the per-movie actor images.

@@Luke it would also be very cool with per tv series actor images. Most of the time you get actor specific shots on TheTVDB related directly to the show itself. Being able to have it show up the different photos per show would be very cool.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

Hey guys, just had another quick couple of questions:

 

I've just noticed that MB Server has not been saving local episode thumbs into the season folders. eg. S01E01 - Episode 1-thumb.jpg

 

I'm running the latest Dev build in order to test the changes to the XBMC Saver, is this a feature that is currently removed or have I just not noticed it's abcence as I have existing thumbs from previously using Metabrowser to manage my collection?

 

Regarding Season fanart, I have been unable to replicate @@sfnetwork screenshots above, when I view the image selector at the season level it only returns 'primary' images for the season posters, it returns 0 backdrops.

Edited by Ethyria
Link to comment
Share on other sites

yea we save episodes thumbs in the season folder when using the xbmc convention, but if you already have episodes images that we recognize, it won't save a duplicate.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

yea we save episodes thumbs in the season folder when using the xbmc convention, but if you already have episodes images that we recognize, it won't save a duplicate.

 

Sorry I had a bit of a blonde moment, looks like it is populating the thumbs for all my MP4 and AVI,  but it doesn't seem to be able to extract them from MKV. I could see the image in MB Server but not in the season folder for that show.

 

EDIT: Thought I would include a sreenshot. As you can see the image appears in MB Server but not in the directory. This is also the case for other MKV episodes:

 

post-948-0-21057000-1384929551_thumb.jpg

Edited by Ethyria
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...