Genre only (1 Viewer)

[borgster]

Okay, I've been playing around for awhile and have everything working as intended at this point.
Custom artwork? Check.
Box sets? Check
Fan Art? Check.
Getting database to load with home movies as needed? Check.

The only thing I haven't been able to figure out is how to change it so when you go to category view that I only have Genre's listed and not umpteen dozen categories I'd never want to sort by (run time, aspect, etc) when choosing a movie to watch.

It's probably something simple that I'm missing but after two weeks of playing with things I can't seem to find a way to narrow that down to where I only see Genres.

I should mention that I have it start out in the Film view so that all movies are initially shown.

 

[Dadeo]

Hi borgster - sounds like you're doing well! The Category view displays whatever data you have in your db in the DB field set for Category View in Setup > Views tab - default is Category field ofc. Each 'occurrence' or 'value' is determined by the List separators in Setup > Views Tab. So, unless I misunderstood you, it sounds like either your data or setup is a bit borked . Are you using a movie catalog, or did you create your database using MyFilms/AMCU? How did you grab/get your data? If you can post your MyFilms.xml config file, and either your XML catalog file or a sample, I may be able to help you sort it out.

 

[borgster]

Hmmm, okay. I'll have to look in to that a little bit further.

My import process is a little complicated due to films and extras that don't scan via internet I create .NFO files using tiny media center and then use AMCU to import off of .NFO. This process allows me to add artwork and descriptions to my home made movie media files and extras. Though till I get things sorted out I've left a lot of the descriptions blank for now.

 

[borgster]

I must be missing an option to cut down on the number of things that show up in the Category view.

 

[Dadeo]

OK if you check Category for all your 'ZZ Extras' you will see in Category field:

fileinfostreamdetailsvideowidth/widthheight/heightaspect/aspectcodec/codecformat/formatdurationinseconds/durationinsecondsbitrate/bitratecontainer/containerscantype/scantype/videoaudiolanguage/languagecodec/codecchannels/channelsbitrate/bitrate/audiosubtitlelanguage/languagelanguage/language/subtitle/streamdetails/fileinfotitle/titleset/setsorttitle/sorttitleyear/yearplot/plotruntime/runtimeplaycount/playcountcreatedate/createdatestars/stars

that will give you Categories for each of those 'values' between the / since is is a default separator.

It's possible the issue is with the NFO grabber. Actually I am just working on it now to try and support TMM properly. It was originally designed for Ember Media Manager. Every app says it supports the XMBC format but there are variations in both tags and data/values It's driving me crazy LOL

So, if you could post a sample .nfo file for one of your 'Extras' I can ensure the NFO grabber handles that info correctly.

BTW you know you can link the Extras to the movie if you want? IIRC if you set the Extended Trailers Search path (e.g. E:\Movies\ZZ Extras (group)) when you search and add trailers it will link them to the movie, and then you can select and play them using the Trailers option via the context menu (info/more remote button). Do you have all your 'extras' stored as separate entries in TMM?

 

[borgster]

Actually, I had forgotten this because the extras that are currently stored were test versions while I tried to get things up and running the way I wanted them to look. Originally I had an area for home movies and then for movie extras was putting them in the same folder. That obviously caused some issues in both fan art and a few other things so I decided to move everything over to the extras folder.

What I had forgotten is for the extras I was using Media Companion V3.5.8.9 for only the extras and Home movies because it has a dedicated routine for non internet based media and it doesn't even try to find or cross match. It just creates a blank NFO file unless I fill information in and creates a screen shot from the video file to use as fanart.

I mention this because I just generated another NFO and it's clean from all of the artificats in the Genre portion. (I will attach the new test NFO that was just created for comparison purposes. Now at one point when working with AMCU I had told it on an update to rewrite all NFO files (without thinking about the blank NFO files from the extras). So I'm going to try to recreate that with a before and after NFO because I think the Genre confusion on the extras NFO's appeared when I had AMCU update all the NFO's because the actor fields weren't populating from the Tiny Media Managers NFO files. (I had tried ember media manager but I had some issues with that, but will probably play with it again this weekend when I have an abundance of free time again.)

When I ran the test for the attached files the NFO was basically empty after coming out of Media Companion, I then imported the test file with the test NFO in to AMCU and the data remained uncorrupted. However, I then ran AMCU update to update all the NFO files and that's when the genre field and others got popuated. This is an oddball case because of what I was to accomplish and the way I went about it but AMCU is clearly updating blank fields with information when it rewrites the NFO files.

Sorry about having forgotten I has used Media Companion in my early testing to create the home video files but I chose that one because it created blank NFO's which is all I needed at that point in time.

Regarding all the extras, for the most part they are all stored in their own folder grouped by the movie in question and the home movies when I start adding them will be in their own folders in a year/location file hierarchy.[DOUBLEPOST=1386640591][/DOUBLEPOST]I will play around with the trailer Idea this weekend when I have free time, that could be an interesting way to go about it.

Thank you for your assistance in looking in to this, I know I went about it a round about way and thought I had a reasonable solution to the issue.

 

[Dadeo]

Glad I was able to help! However, if you use AMCU to write NFO files I strongly recommend you use MyFilms.nfo file handling for now rather than overwrite your current NFO, because the format doesn't match. There are so many more fields in MyFilms that the NFO 'standard' doesn't handle. I think Guzzi intended MyFilms NFO as a way to backup your data to NFO files, not use them in other apps. But the NFO grabber doesn't import all the data (it's really only for EMM) so it's kinda half done. I already reported : Issue 363: Cannot import nfo files created by AMCU Update nfo files. If enough people 'star' the issue, maybe it will get fixed soon(er).

Thanks for the test NFOs! Now I can go even more insane with even more variations. Even in EMM there are so many options about what is grabbed and how data is output to the NFO I'm having trouble getting it to work for all cases. TMM NFO format is much closer to MyFilms database structure.

 

[borgster]

Glad to be of, ummm help. I think. Only reason I was rewriting the NFO files was because the actor data wasn't loading and I wanted to try to speed of recovery of a database crash if for some reason the DB became corrupted. I went with the most basic NFO file creation so as to hopefully not cause any conflicts..obviously a fail

 

[Dadeo]

You don't need to worry about MyFilms DB crash since it backs up your db every time you make a change (you'll find a ton of backups in your catalog folder!) But ofc that doesn't help you with TMM db crash . But I don't understand why you expected to get actors for your 'Extras' when I thought you said you didn't scrape data for them - just added some desc etc.

I was thinking some more about the "Trailer' method for your Extras. You can probably just add them to TMM as trailers if you want - I will add Trailers to the NFO grabber and then they will automatically be scraped from NFO when you update MyFilms. Ofc that way you don't get separate descriptions for each extra though.

Another 'tip' - whenever you want to add videos to MyFilms using AMCU without scraping data from the net, you can just change the Title handling to Folder or File instead of + Internet Lookup. Also, if you do continue to add your 'extras' separately, you can autogenerate thumbs instead of movie poster on the Database Fields tab in AMCU setup under Cover Handling. (You can also do that using the Fanart Manager, Create Fanart option in GUI - even select the exact frame you want to capture)

 

[borgster]

Sorry miscommunication, the actors not importing was for movies not for the extras. Once the extras and that are in I go through and move them to the excluded list so it doesn't try to update them later.

Thanks for the tips. Took me awhile to figure everything out but getting there now. Of course part of the curve was hampered by the process of comparing XBMC with Mediaportal, and learning windows 8.1 and determining how I wanted to handle everything else. Not to mention working a couple of kinks out of the system that I built. Not to mention also learning all the complimentary programs. That said, Myfilms rocks, it just has a bit of a learning curve attached to it