How to exclude certain videos?

In some of my movie folders I have the main movie that I have encoded and then I might have say a version with the Director soundtrack or an extra. These are often named things that make NO sense to XBMC companion or even to XBMC. I don't want them added to my library but after using XBMC companion to delete the NFO file a rescan seems to bring them back. Is there something I can do to prevent this short of deleting or somehow moving that content somewhere? This would seem to be a common issue but darned if my searches turned up anything so hopefully this isn't something with an obvious answer

Not sure if there is such a thing but there should be....

For a TV show episode you just need to make sure that it doesn't have a recognisable series & episode, but for a TV Show series or Movie I'm not sure if there is a method to name the movie so that that movie is ignored...

Anyone else have any ideas?

Cheers

There is no way for Media Companion to differentiate between the 2 files.

The only filter at the moment is for trailers.

The only way to get this to work is to create a naming convention that is ignored by XBMC and Media Companion.

I will consider adding at some point a small db of some kind that allows people to mark wrongly scraped nfos, so that once deleted they wont be scraped again.

Okay, I wasn't sure if this existed or not. Honestly I'm not sure a database is needed - perhaps just a small file in the directory that your tool would recognize and know meant to leave those files alone would do it. That way it could also be easily undone and would probably be much less code to worry about - especially if someone upgraded versions of your tool or ran your tool from a second computer. Probably less code too do it this way too actually. <shrug>

It occurs to me XBMC might also need this, I'll ask about that as well.

There is something in advancedsettings.xml that you can add so that certain filenames dont get added to the library. I'll see if I can dig up the info.


Edit: here it is: http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=Advancedsettings.xml#.3Cexcludefromscan.2Fexcludefromlisting.3E

Ya, saw the advanced setting mentioned on the XBMC forum. However that means modifying ALL of my "extra" clips and XBMC Media Companion will try to tag them anyway I think.... So, no perfect solution yet

Even if I was to include a way for Media Companion to skip a file then XBMC would still scrape from IMDB instead.

billyad2000 wrote:

Even if I was to include a way for Media Companion to skip a file then XBMC would still scrape from IMDB instead.

FYI: I use Media Companion and don't intend to ever use XBMC so that issue wouldn't effect people who use it like me. I use this program as it is the first of two programs that I know of and have tried that meets my "must have" of being a distributed database (the data is with the movie). The programs main failing is that once the data is in there is little in the way of help in finding movies that meet certain criteria but that is another issue (I may write something to do this yet).

As for how it could easily be incorporated (assuming you don't want to complicate the interface), in your folder settings you list movie and TV folders, I'd suggest that if a folder name begins with "-" then that would logically mean the opposite of include (that is to "exclude"). It would not be difficult to check whether any particular folder you are thinking about scraping has a path that begins with one of the excluded paths. You could also get more creative and say that if the excluded path doesn't contain a slash (path) then this is the name of the last part of the directory name to be excluded.

Because of decoding issues with the devices (PC and BeyonWiz) I use I will now have to have multiple copies of some movies, I'd also now like to be able to exclude my BeyonWiz copies (it doesn't run this program in any case!).

dbareis wrote:

billyad2000 wrote:

Even if I was to include a way for Media Companion to skip a file then XBMC would still scrape from IMDB instead.

FYI: I use Media Companion and don't intend to ever use XBMC so that issue wouldn't effect people who use it like me. I use this program as it is the first of two programs that I know of and have tried that meets my "must have" of being a distributed database (the data is with the movie). The programs main failing is that once the data is in there is little in the way of help in finding movies that meet certain criteria but that is another issue (I may write something to do this yet).

As for how it could easily be incorporated (assuming you don't want to complicate the interface), in your folder settings you list movie and TV folders, I'd suggest that if a folder name begins with "-" then that would logically mean the opposite of include (that is to "exclude"). It would not be difficult to check whether any particular folder you are thinking about scraping has a path that begins with one of the excluded paths. You could also get more creative and say that if the excluded path doesn't contain a slash (path) then this is the name of the last part of the directory name to be excluded.

Because of decoding issues with the devices (PC and BeyonWiz) I use I will now have to have multiple copies of some movies, I'd also now like to be able to exclude my BeyonWiz copies (it doesn't run this program in any case!).

I like it, from the next version any folder starting with "-" will be excluded

I will be greatly extending the movie genre filters soon to include ratings, year etc

Adding the "-" opion to the folder doesn't seem to work for me. I'm using version 3.5.0.0. But the video files under -Extra folder still get scanned and added to the database.