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[SteveGoff]

I'm frustrated to the point that I'm about to give up.

I love Media Center for playing music, and find it easy to use in that context.

But I cannot figure out how to import movies and TV shows so they show up and make sense. I have several movies in DVD and MKV formats. I also have TV episodes in DVR-MS and MKV formats. The movies are in individual folders for each movie, and those folders are all in one movies folder. My TV shows are in folders by season, and each season is in a show folder, which is in the TV folder. Each episode is named by season and episode, along with the name of the episode (e.g., "The West Wing - s01e05 - The Crackpots and These Women.mkv"). XBMC, Mediabrowser,  MyMovies, MediaMaster, and other video collection/data retrieval software have no problem sorting this out and showing a movie as a single file and TV shows by show, season, and episode, with cover art, background art, and show information.

I want to use Media Center to play movies and TV shows, but I can't figure out how to import them so they make any sense. I've tried auto importing, and I get an undifferentiated mess, with no recognition of most TV episodes as such, no cover art, no show information. The link to Wikipedia usually does no good, and the information in nfo, tbr, and srt files isn't used, though maybe MyMovies xml files are picked up. And I can't figure out after the fact how to tell Media Center what files are TV shows, what files are movies, and how to make things look sensible in theater view or standard view. This is the exact opposite of music, where Media Center has it all over some competitors.

I've looked at the wiki, I've searched the forum, I've searched with Google, and I can't find the key.

[The Mastermind]

You need to automatically fill in properties by...

right click > library tools > fill properties from filename

You then enter the naming convention you use judgin by your example it would be [Series] - [Episode] - [Name]

That will sort things out somewhat better, but won't sort all your problems.

[imugli]

If you're already using mymovies, you can export your mymovies collection as an xml file and import it to MC as a playlist.

[struct]

media subtype field is where you set TV or Movie, this then allows them to show up in default views.

I have used Personal Video Database to get the metadata and PVDImport to get it into MC.  Does covers, ratings etc link MyMovies but a bit more flexible, and more sources for metadata.  No fanart though (I think).  Although fairly painless, it is not a one stop shop which it should be. 

[SteveGoff]

Thanks all. I finally figured out that you can change sub types directly. I kept trying to find a way by right clicking or changing tags.