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Best way to manage movie metadata and to display them in theaterview?

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Osho:
I am organizing a lot of my movies on the hard-drive : some of them are in .iso files, some are in VIDEO_TS folder and some are in either .avi or .mkv format. I am looking for ways to properly tag these and display them in theater view. Here are a few questions:

1. What is the best way to automatically tag these movies? I have seen references to using mymovies.xml and     
MoviesSeriesInfos Automation solutions in the forum. Which of this is better? Note that I have many non-English movies in my collection.

2. Is it possible to have a "Movies" top-level menu along with Audio, Images, Video in the Theater-View? I would like movies to not show up as part of Video but separately.

Thanks,
Osho

rick.ca:
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.


--- Quote ---I have many non-English movies in my collection.
--- End quote ---

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.


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

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.

Osho:
Thank you Rick for such a detailed response. I really appreciate it.

Thanks,
Osho

FPacheco:

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

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.

glynor:
Thanks for this topic, Rick.  I hadn't seen it before.  I'm going to try out AutoMeta later this week and see if it meets some of my needs.

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