Way to Backup Custom Categories/Menus (1 Viewer)

[STANirvanaIND]

Hi All,

I have a relatively large Moving Pictures database (~3400 films) with a lot of menu/category customizations (Directors, Actors, Bond Movies, Abbot & Costello, etc.). I've been running Moving Pictures since probably v.6.x, never rebuilding the database from scratch (at least not in memory), however, recently my installation has started to show some irregularities (not the only plugin doing this) and I'd like to do a complete refresh (New Windows installation, new Mediaportal install) to not only fix these irregularities but also format this unit (it was the first) in the same vein as my others (using Symbolic Links for directories, etc; essentially allowing more flexibility and expandability).

Anyway, after that long winded introduction my question is whether there is a way to backup my custom menu entries and reimport them into the new installation. Some use custom rules which wouldn't be a major pain to remake (Directors, Actors, etc., although there are a lot of them to remake), while others have to have movies individually added (Zombies genre for some films, etc) which is a major pain when you have a large database (or was in the past) due to the large delays (and sometimes freezes) when loading the movie list.

Also a side question: Assuming that I make sure the directories are the same in advanced settings, if I move all my artwork data from the original install and put it on the new install (in the correct directory obviously) will MP use the artwork already downloaded (names unchanged) or will it try to redownload? Thanks for the help.

 

[RoChess]

The easiest way for artwork, custom titles, or any other movie details modifications, is to use MovPicNFO plugin to save all that info alongside your media files (NFO file for textual data and images for artwork). Via the XBMC scraper-script you can then do a super fast (off-line even if needed) re-import that will have everything in it.

For the menu/categories however that does not work, and there is no build in method to export/import (it is a long outstanding feature request). There are still ways to do it via manual SQLite manupilations, but that is not easy to explain in a forum post.

I suffer from your exact same situation, however any irregularties have repaired itself, or I have manually corrected them. You can actually run an SQLite command to detect database corruption that are causing issues.