Disable nfo and tbn files? Strictly only download artwork?

Hey all,

Just a quick one.

I have been using Media Companion for a while now to keep my media in sweet shape - excellent work btw, genius program.

I don't however use any form of media player that makes use of the .nfo or .tbn files, and as such am wondering if there is a way to skip their creation during the scarping process.

Effectively, I just want to be able to use Media Companion to be able to download artwork for my media, and do the occasional bulk renaming of episodes etc.

I have tried turning off all options related to .nfo and .tbn creation, but they still seem to be created.

Currently I use a .bat script to recursively traverse through my folder structure and delete any .nfo and .tbn files it comes across. This works, but whenever I add new media, I am still needing to run this script again to remove the new .nfo and .tbn files, and the scraping process is also longer etc.

Any thoughts?

This feature really the the core purpose for MC to save XBMC from having to scrape the various media file information. Also the created nfo's then hold the scraped information so that you can view it in MC.

The scraping itself is the time consuming part not the actual writing of the nfo files themselves.

Also if you remove an nfo file & ask MC to search for new episodes it will scrape any movie file that doesn't have an associated nfo again.

I can see your issue though, browsing via a computer will show a jumble of files making it difficult to see just the movies/shows. On XBMC only the supported video files are shown even in file view mode.

Somehow you would need to hide the files from the operating system (hidden attribute maybe), but they still be visible for MC so that it doesn't rescrape them everytime......

Cheers

Thanks for that tip.

I made a .bat file with this code in it:

attrib /S *.nfo +h
attrib /S *.tbn +h

It recursively goes through all folders and sets the properties of all .tbn and .nfo files to hidden.

I might try making them hidden system files and see if Media Companion can still read them. To do that I am going to use this code:

EDIT: This worked, Media Companion was able to still read the now system hidden .nfo and .tbn files. Whether or not XBMC will still be able to though, someone else will have to test out I guess.

attrib /S *.nfo +h +s
attrib /S *.tbn +h +s

I don't actually use XBMC at all, I watch my media with my PS3 and PS3 Media Server, I just wanted to be able to download all the artwork for each movie/tv show easily so it would show up as a thumbnail on my PS3.

My main gripe was indeed how untidy my media collection becomes once I run Media Companion over it all. Making the files hidden will correct this though (aesthetically atleast).

No worries glad to see that worked.

BTW to make it a little easier you can add your batch file as command that appears under the TOOLS menu option.

Just go to General Preferences - Custom Commands & add the path to the batch file & name it appropriately & the command will be just a click away.

Cheers