I'm struggling to understand the purpose?

Hi All,

I am a relatively new user of Media Companion, but an long time user of xbmc. Over the years I have lived with artwork not matching or appearing correctly. But then when I saw MC I thought I would invest the time in getting everything corrected.

So I went through all my movies and TV shows and got everything looking right in MC. Then I went into a fresh install of XBMC and searched for new content.
I expected xbmc to use the artwork and info that MC had downloaded, but instead it went ahead and re-downloaded everything using its own scrapers. In many cases it got things wrong.

Am I missing something fundamental with regards to the purpose of MC? Surely it makes no sense to download one set of artwork 'for fun' and then have xbmc completely ignore same and attempt to re-scrape everything from scratch! Any insights appreciated as I am sure I must be missing something important!

Thanks
Jab

PS - Since using MC (for whatever reason I cannot figure out!), none of my TV shows display anymore with the landscape artwork. Everything now displays with the portrait poster. I have searched and searched but cannot figure out why!

OK a couple of basic questions to confirm we are on the right track...

In XBMC you are using the library mode right?
When you add to library your movies folder you're setting the content to IMDB? TV Shows to TVDB?

OK if the above is correct (probably is since you say its scraping data on its own) then...


If XBMC sees an .nfo file in the same location as the movie file, it will get the information from that nfo file before it trys to get it from the internet.

This is the purpose of MC, to create those .nfo files accurately & download the correct posters & fanart too.

So if that is not working as expected something is amiss somewhere.

A quick test is in MC change the plot of a movie & then in XBMC refresh content on that movie. The new plot should appear. If not I would say XBMC cannot see your nfo files for some reason.

PS you don't say if your XBMC is on an xbox or PC, I find that running it on a PC allows quicker testing to diagnose issues so perhaps you can try that in case there is an issue with the xbox setup.

Cheers

StormyKnight wrote:

OK a couple of basic questions to confirm we are on the right track...

In XBMC you are using the library mode right?
When you add to library your movies folder you're setting the content to IMDB? TV Shows to TVDB?

OK if the above is correct (probably is since you say its scraping data on its own) then...


If XBMC sees an .nfo file in the same location as the movie file, it will get the information from that nfo file before it trys to get it from the internet.

This is the purpose of MC, to create those .nfo files accurately & download the correct posters & fanart too.

So if that is not working as expected something is amiss somewhere.

A quick test is in MC change the plot of a movie & then in XBMC refresh content on that movie. The new plot should appear. If not I would say XBMC cannot see your nfo files for some reason.

PS you don't say if your XBMC is on an xbox or PC, I find that running it on a PC allows quicker testing to diagnose issues so perhaps you can try that in case there is an issue with the xbox setup.

Cheers

Hi!

Thanks for the quick response. I am running on XBOX as opposed to windows. Yep, am using library mode and do have library set to TVDB and IMDB respectively.

So, take an example of a test scenario. I put a single TV show in my TV Shows folder and use MC to select and then catalog the information about the show. It goes ahead and downloads all of the .nfo files and artwork files. In the root of the TV show folder I get something like the following:

Season 2 [folder]
Season 3 [folder]
Season 4 [folder]
Season 1 [folder]
season-specials.tbn
season01.tbn
season02.tbn
season03.tbn
season04.tbn
season05.tbn
season06.tbn
fanart.jpg
folder.jpg
season-all.tbn
tvshow.nfo

Within each folder, each eipside gets a .tbn etc..etc..

When I then go into xbmc and choose to scan for updates in the library, it correctly finds the new tv show and (I believe) it correctly parses the .NFO file and uses the information contained within. But it then goes and re-downloads all of the artwork, ignoring the artwork that I have selected using MC. In some cases, it downloads a correct piece of artwork (poster) for the movie or TV show, but this is not the updated one that I selected using MC.

Also, (and maybe not related), before using MC, all of the (partially complete) TV show top level artwork that I had was displaying in landscape (eg: wide images). Now XBMC seems only to ever download the portrait poster version and I cannot get a TV show to use the landscape version, even though the landscape version does appear correctly in MC when I match the folder to a show (subsequently MC shows a portrait poster). Again, maybe I am doing something wrong?

Finally, in order to test all of the above and try to get it working, I am finding that I have to remove the TV show from my TV shows folder, then use the XBMC "Clean Library" menu to remove it. The drop it back in again (with any changes made). Maybe I am doing this wrong too?

Thanks for any help,
Jab

What version of XBMC are you using, I had issues similar I think before or at Atlantis......You could see it getting the nfo information & then scraping from the internet straight afterwards. It also was easy to see in the XBMC log files.....

What I have now done is blocked the IP of my XBOX machine in my router, that way XBMC cannot access the internet. Once I'm happy that it is using the nfos I could reenable access for the RSS feeds for example but to date I haven't reenabled it.

Is that something you can do to confirm where XBMC is getting it data from by trying something like that?

Cheers

StormyKnight wrote:

What version of XBMC are you using, I had issues similar I think before or at Atlantis......You could see it getting the nfo information & then scraping from the internet straight afterwards. It also was easy to see in the XBMC log files.....

What I have now done is blocked the IP of my XBOX machine in my router, that way XBMC cannot access the internet. Once I'm happy that it is using the nfos I could reenable access for the RSS feeds for example but to date I haven't reenabled it.

Is that something you can do to confirm where XBMC is getting it data from by trying something like that?

Cheers

Hi,

Thanks to those suggestions and a lot of thrawling through the logs, I think most issues are now sorted. First part of the problem was that there were old folder.jpg's that were not being overrwitten by MC. Setting changes in MC fixed this.

Second problem was that the cache in MC needed to be cleared. What a pain in the ass it is to have to do this!!

Now I am only stuck trying to figure out why the hell my landscape artwork wont display for TV Shows. The season-all.tbn is being loaded into the XBMC cache (checked debug logs), but it is never displayed on screen.

<rant>
Am reading the goddam code at the moment to try to figure out the problem. Having to do stuff like this is really dissappointing....it shows that xbmc is still a long way from main stream. You still gotta have a bit of nerd in you to use if effectively!
</rant>

Anyway, thanks for the help,
Jab

So do you think its an XBMC issue or an MC issue?

StormyKnight wrote:

So do you think its an XBMC issue or an MC issue?

Sorry, should have clarified that point. As best as I can establish, I think it may be an xbmc issue. Still investigating!
Thanks again for the help,
Jab

easy.... add source > set content > search by folder name
That's for movies. If you figure out tv shows let me know I have been posting threads and using their irc channel looking for an answer. irc btw is server: freenode #xbmc have a crack at trying to get some info out of those guys I had no response.

XBMC will almost certainly access the internet during scraping, this is usually to download actor thumbnails, are you sure you are not mistaking this action for downloading posters and fanart.

Not all skins support all graphical features,

I use Transparency in library mode and all the graphical options work perfectly.

To check if local fanart is being used, goto the item nfo page on XBMC and select change poster, you will be given a list of available posters, including 'current poster' and 'local poster' , if XBMC has got the poster from the tbn or jpg file then these should be the same.