How to Integrate with XBMC

First of all thanks to the author for devoting time to this program, it is quite needed and I ope you keep developing!
I understand how it works but I don't understand how to integrate the results of media companion with XBMC...

Say I have an empty library in my XBMC and I map a drive that contains movie titles, nfo and posters as created by MediaCompanion. How do I tell XBMC to take this info to generate the library... how do I make sure it doesn't try to download the info from the internet... I'm just confused...

The idea is that you need do nothing, as long as your media files are visible to XBMC then it checks for the .nfo file. An available valid .nfo file takes priority over internet scraping.

From XBMC just select to scrape your media.

It scrapes all the information from the .nfo and not the internet. The only thing that needs to be downloaded from the internet is actor thumbnails, but only then when the .nfo contains a valid url.

Thanks, I understand now. I just tried and it worked pretty good. One thing though is that I get the impression that the thumbs/poster I purposely chnaged for some movies in media companion did not show up as I chose them in XBMC... I remember seeing something in the settings of XBMC regarding the source for the posters, perhaps that's the reson?

spe05081 wrote:

First of all thanks to the author for devoting time to this program, it is quite needed and I ope you keep developing!
I understand how it works but I don't understand how to integrate the results of media companion with XBMC...

Say I have an empty library in my XBMC and I map a drive that contains movie titles, nfo and posters as created by MediaCompanion. How do I tell XBMC to take this info to generate the library... how do I make sure it doesn't try to download the info from the internet... I'm just confused...

could you elaborate on what you did on your PC? Did you run MediaCompanion to do the scraping and then it created an NFO file which XBMC will look at? Sorry if this is documented somewhere but I don't even know where to start. I plan to install MediaStream when I get home tongiht.

Thanks in advance! Steve

billyad2000 wrote:

The idea is that you need do nothing, as long as your media files are visible to XBMC then it checks for the .nfo file. An available valid .nfo file takes priority over internet scraping.

From XBMC just select to scrape your media.

It scrapes all the information from the .nfo and not the internet. The only thing that needs to be downloaded from the internet is actor thumbnails, but only then when the .nfo contains a valid url.

Just wanted to start with a big Thanks for all of your work on this great app!

My question is should xbmc still take quite a long time to scape the directory? It takes almost 1 minute per movie... Is that to be expected?

Torch wrote:

Just wanted to start with a big Thanks for all of your work on this great app!

My question is should xbmc still take quite a long time to scape the directory? It takes almost 1 minute per movie... Is that to be expected?

If you are using an Xbox then it can be rather slow, even scraping nfo files, you can speed things up a bit if you disable actor thumbnails, since these tend to be downloaded from the internet.

Even so, for XBMC to scrape my 1200 movies without nfo files took 2 whole days, and then I had to correct all the errors, at least this way you know the movies are correct.