Germany
Hello everyone,
I ran into the problem that I had to rescan my moviecollection and found it rather anoying that I had to match so many movies again by hand, that I started looking for help and this threat is the summary of what I did.
Who's this for?
So this threat adresses to people who do not have their movie collection organized on your hard drive with folder names and so on so that MovingPictures or maybe another HTPC software like XBMC can easily match your files to actual movies.
What will be the result?
Following this guide will make you end up with all your movies in your collection beeing saved in a seperate folder with named like "movie name (year) [imdb-id]" and in that folder there will be the movie file(s) named like "movie name (year) [imdb-id] part x" ("part x" only for movies spread over more than one file), a cover art named folder.jpg, a backdrop named backdrop.jpg, a .txt or .nfo file containing information about the movie and all other files (subtitles, audio and so) named with the already mentioned pattern.
So whenever you need to reimport your movies into MovPic you will never be faced matching single movies again.
Where we start from
Let's saume the following: You have a bunch of movies which are named in all different ways in one sinlge folder, some movies are spread over several files and you did not import them into MovPic yet.
Step 1 - Putting all your movies into seperate folders
Now, that would be a pain in the ass to get all those movies into a single folder if it wasn't for this little batch file, which helps us a lot. Executed in a folder it puts each file in this folder into a seperate folder named like the file.
But be aware, that it puts every into a folder, so be sure that there a no other files but movie files. Only thing you manually have to deal with are those movies spread over more than one file, you will need to put those manually back again into one folder.
Step 2 - Movie matching
Now this will be the only step where you need to do more stuff by hand.
A First thing you should do is the following:
Since we are going to use the folder names for matching it is important that those are not completely screwed up, they should at least contain the movie name seperated from other stuff by a single space, so names like "avatardivxrip" should be renamed like "avatar", you will not have to do that for every movie, but my experience says that there are some really strange names.
Once again, do not rename anything but the folder, since all that stuff in there will be renamed automatically later on!
B Second is for the choice of the scraper:
If you used the standard scraper settings of MovPic it is ok, but I figured out, that there are two great alternatives that will get you a cleaner and more consistent database. The first one is for english users, it's IMDB+. The second one is it's sister project for german users - FilmInfo+.
C Third is the movie import
Now with the above setup we open MPConfig and go to plugins and there we open the MovPic config and start importing from our movie location. Now we let MovPic do and depending on the quality of our movies we will end up with more or less movies we have to match manually. Sometimes we even need to tell the scraper to search again and type in what it should look for and for some movies we need to choose between movies with the same name.
OK, all this is a bunch of work, but the following steps will save you from ever beeing in the need from doing this again.
Step 3 - Renaming your files and folders and putting some art in there
OK, we got all our movies imported in MovPic, fine! Until we need to reimport (new client, system went bad, whatever else). That would make you look like this
and therefore you should do the following:
A Renaming folders and files
MovPic has a renaming function integrated that will let you rename folders and files with information from the movie. How it works you can find here.
I suggest you use the following rename pattern "movie name (year) [imdb-id]" and additionally for more part movies you should add "part x" to the file name. You should also use the function to rename each other file, so they will never be lost again. Here is the string for the file name, just leave "movie.part" out for the folder:
B Putting a cover, a backdrop and an info file into each folder
Now, to make a new import quicker, it is very nice to have a cover art, a backdrop and also an info file in there. Furtunately there is a tool to do this. Just look here.
I advice not to name the info file with the movie filename since it will produce more than one file if the movie is spread over more than one file (those stupid spread movies), just name it movie.nfo and it is ok. Maybe this will be corrected in a later version.
That's it!
We got a nice and clean movie collection. With thumbnail view in windows we even see the cover art now and this collection can be imported into MovPic easily.
I hope it's all understandable so you can follow my explanations. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the result.
Don't forget to thank all those people who did those plugins, programs, scrapers and scripts!
I ran into the problem that I had to rescan my moviecollection and found it rather anoying that I had to match so many movies again by hand, that I started looking for help and this threat is the summary of what I did.
Who's this for?
So this threat adresses to people who do not have their movie collection organized on your hard drive with folder names and so on so that MovingPictures or maybe another HTPC software like XBMC can easily match your files to actual movies.
What will be the result?
Following this guide will make you end up with all your movies in your collection beeing saved in a seperate folder with named like "movie name (year) [imdb-id]" and in that folder there will be the movie file(s) named like "movie name (year) [imdb-id] part x" ("part x" only for movies spread over more than one file), a cover art named folder.jpg, a backdrop named backdrop.jpg, a .txt or .nfo file containing information about the movie and all other files (subtitles, audio and so) named with the already mentioned pattern.
So whenever you need to reimport your movies into MovPic you will never be faced matching single movies again.
Where we start from
Let's saume the following: You have a bunch of movies which are named in all different ways in one sinlge folder, some movies are spread over several files and you did not import them into MovPic yet.
Step 1 - Putting all your movies into seperate folders
Now, that would be a pain in the ass to get all those movies into a single folder if it wasn't for this little batch file, which helps us a lot. Executed in a folder it puts each file in this folder into a seperate folder named like the file.
But be aware, that it puts every into a folder, so be sure that there a no other files but movie files. Only thing you manually have to deal with are those movies spread over more than one file, you will need to put those manually back again into one folder.
Step 2 - Movie matching
Now this will be the only step where you need to do more stuff by hand.
A First thing you should do is the following:
Since we are going to use the folder names for matching it is important that those are not completely screwed up, they should at least contain the movie name seperated from other stuff by a single space, so names like "avatardivxrip" should be renamed like "avatar", you will not have to do that for every movie, but my experience says that there are some really strange names.
Once again, do not rename anything but the folder, since all that stuff in there will be renamed automatically later on!
B Second is for the choice of the scraper:
If you used the standard scraper settings of MovPic it is ok, but I figured out, that there are two great alternatives that will get you a cleaner and more consistent database. The first one is for english users, it's IMDB+. The second one is it's sister project for german users - FilmInfo+.
C Third is the movie import
Now with the above setup we open MPConfig and go to plugins and there we open the MovPic config and start importing from our movie location. Now we let MovPic do and depending on the quality of our movies we will end up with more or less movies we have to match manually. Sometimes we even need to tell the scraper to search again and type in what it should look for and for some movies we need to choose between movies with the same name.
OK, all this is a bunch of work, but the following steps will save you from ever beeing in the need from doing this again.
Step 3 - Renaming your files and folders and putting some art in there
OK, we got all our movies imported in MovPic, fine! Until we need to reimport (new client, system went bad, whatever else). That would make you look like this
and therefore you should do the following:A Renaming folders and files
MovPic has a renaming function integrated that will let you rename folders and files with information from the movie. How it works you can find here.
I suggest you use the following rename pattern "movie name (year) [imdb-id]" and additionally for more part movies you should add "part x" to the file name. You should also use the function to rename each other file, so they will never be lost again. Here is the string for the file name, just leave "movie.part" out for the folder:
Code:
${movie.title} (${movie.year}) [${movie.imdb_id}] ${moviepart}B Putting a cover, a backdrop and an info file into each folder
Now, to make a new import quicker, it is very nice to have a cover art, a backdrop and also an info file in there. Furtunately there is a tool to do this. Just look here.
I advice not to name the info file with the movie filename since it will produce more than one file if the movie is spread over more than one file (those stupid spread movies), just name it movie.nfo and it is ok. Maybe this will be corrected in a later version.
That's it!
We got a nice and clean movie collection. With thumbnail view in windows we even see the cover art now and this collection can be imported into MovPic easily.
I hope it's all understandable so you can follow my explanations. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the result.
Don't forget to thank all those people who did those plugins, programs, scrapers and scripts!