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There's a growing number of alternatives for automatically tagging video files. In addition to those you mention, there's raldo's PvdImport and llafriel's AutoMeta. PvdImport imports the data from Personal Video Database, a powerful and flexible application that can download and combine data and art from a variety of different sources. AutoMeta imports information from TMDb for movies and TVDb for series. These are open databases that are growing, but still somewhat limited in their coverage. The range of information maintained for an entry is also restricted to the most common elements—although this is all most users want.

So, just considering these two alternatives, those who want more control and flexibility over the collection of metadata will be drawn towards the PvdImport solution. That involves investing some time with a separate application designed for that purpose (and, IMHO, does it better that most similar applications). Once a database is created in PVD, PvdImport does a very good job of seamlessly and automatically importing and updating the information. Once configured and its auto import function engaged, there's essentially nothing for the user to do on the MC side. Those who are not so interested in collecting video data and prefer the easiest path to getting information into MC will be drawn towards AutoMeta. It will do it all in MC, so there's no need to install, configure and maintain a separate database.

I have many non-English movies in my collection.

This may mean PvdImport is a better choice for you. It will download anything from the IMDb (which seems good non-English coverage—at least of "popular" titles) as well as a number of other non-English sources. But there's no need to guess about this—try AutoMeta and see how it does with your collection.

Is it possible to have a "Movies" top-level menu along with Audio, Images, Video in the Theater-View?

Creating a top-level menu is a little obscure. In the Add Library View dialog, set Location to "(Root)". Then configure the new view to include movies only. Change your existing Video view to exclude movies. You'll have to decide the best way to distinguish movies based on your workflow and file organization. It could be by Media Sub Type, if you use that (AutoMeta will set that for you), or it could be by Pathname, Album, etc.

Is it possible to have a "Movies" top-level menu along with Audio, Images, Video in the Theater-View?

I have been able to do this by inserting a Root Library item in tools->options->theater View->add. Renaming "root library item" to Movies and setting a rule to include genre=Movies.  Then I rename Library Item 1 to Comedy and set the rule to search for keyword=comedy. You can then rename the remaining Library Items to other keyword and add searches or remove all the library items if you want all movies displayed from the root library entry.

Hope that helps.

Hi, I know this hasn't been posted to for a while, but you people might be able to help me. I've been transcoding from vob format to m4v format so I can use either a Twonky server or MC15 to send to the TV. As long as the films were in vob format, MC15 imported them as movies. But although it can play m4v format, it imports them as unassigned videos. And even after I change genre to Movie and genres to Movies, they don't show up in the Movie folder within Videos. Which kills autoMeta. And doesn't help my humour either.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. I tried posting to a new topic without results.

Thanks
Mark