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New .nfo creator for Windows - Need a bit of help

New .nfo creator for Windows - Need a bit of help
Published by: smith 2010-03-17

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As you may know there has been a thread open for some time now asking for a method via XBMC to save all scraped movies as seperate nfo's to be stored along side the movie.
http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=29299&highlight=nfo

The biggest reason for this is that it would remove the need to re-scrape movies ever - even if you only have to do it occasionally when you have 1000+ movies it can take days.

I have created a windows based program that will create all of the seperate .nfo's files from the exported video database videodb.xml. for more information about this then see below.
First however I was wondering about a few of the tags,
I have read that the and files are unneccesary for .nfo files stored with the movie. as my program stands they are saved over with all the over tags including any the content. I was wondering if this would cause a problem if the file and .nfo were moved to a different location, do they need to be removed, or if left in then empty, please let me know

Program Details
It works by reading through the exported videodb.xml file, Splitting at the tags and getting the correct filename from the tags

The main problem i encountered was how to save the newly created .nfo files since many of the files are likely to be remote shares, yet to save 1000s of nfo files into a single directory would take many hours to go through and move to the correct folder.
My answer to the above problem was to set a top save directory, then save the nfo files according to the location, i.e
d:movies/ would be all stored in a subfolder called movies/
all share names are suffixed by a $ i.e movies$/, just in case folder names on the XBox HD are the same as share names.

The only problem I can see would be if there was more than one remote server with the same sharename - all nfos in these shares would all be saved into the main folder. the same would apply on XBox partitions i.e d:movies e:movies. these files would have to be sorted manually.

Anyway once the files have all been created then all the nfo's for example in the movies2$/ folder can be copied in one go to the movies2 shared folder.

The program is all but finished, just working on a bit of cosmetic stuff - it saves all the .nfo files, correctly named with the following content (filled in obviously :rolleyes:):

If their are any other tags that need to be removed then please let me know.

Has the .nfo feature been added to XBMC yet?

Here is the latest update:

http://www.mediafire.com/?bzmmrx2y5bm

&
<
>
"
'
should all be processed correctly now

Sleepy - with regards to doubles in the credits, these are scraped as is from IMDB - i checked and a person can be named several times for eg, as story writer and for screen play.

As always, feedback is much appreciated.

Next on my to do list will be to give people the option to strip out unwanted tags.

Latest version 1.92 now available

Download (http://www.datafilehost.com/download-4d5537b1.html)

Just a small update:-

I've noticed a minor issue with the thumbs. If the file has an apostrophe it saves the thumbs with an ' in the filename.Issue now fixed

id's not being filled is a scraper bug and will be resolved shortlyI notice the scraper bug has now been fixed and an option to save only the movie IMDB url to the nfo file has been added. Please note that it is still possible to download the thumbnails per normal when using this option.

also, when videodb.xml already content "minutes" it will change it to "minutesutes"

Thx billyad2000 for creating this program. Makes the creation of nfo files a breeze. I'm always thankful for such things because I don't know how to program and am always a little in awe of people who do. Wish I could do more, but that's life.

A couple of things I was wondering. Is it difficult to make the program remember Input/output directories/locations?

Also, is it possible for the program to create a log that it can scan so that the next time you create nfo's you only output new titles (only the ones added since the last nfo creation)? Perhaps a 2 log process - one for the last scan, a different named one for the new scan (Or the option to give it a specific name). A check box could be added to the interface for full output or only new title output. Using several logs would allow for them to be archived for future reference.

I don't know if this is feasible or not. Thx again.

I've just uploaded the latest version

http://www.mediafire.com/?yjs3jzyzbct

Think this is almost complete now - the options to remove unwanted tags are now implemented. the GUI has also been cleaned up and looks a lot more professional.

If anyone finds a bug then please let me know.

possible for a checkbox to remove tags?

Just tested it, works great man. took like 2 seconds to finish!

Thanx for the feedback folks

As things stand the content body is been copied as is to the nfo file

I'll make it my first task over the next few days to look into identifying these special characters and find a way to output only that character.

Just noticed, the thumbnail entry looks like:

<thumb>http://ia.media-imdb.com/media/imdb/01/I/57/25/28f.jpg</thumb>

That looks like its repeating the tags, can those tags be removed or is there some reason for then doubling up.

Loto_Bak, You've got pm
I should be able to see whats happening better once I've got your videodb.xml.

A config file is on my list of things to do and should be added shortly.

I am also looking at the possibility of including an error log.

that one ran all the way through this time, awesome job. Im sure youre making a lot of fans with this. My setup is i have a folder named the movie name, with separate vobs in it. all these are just onthe root of my drives, not in a main movie folder. should i put the nfo file for each into the folder with the vobs? and will xbmc automatically pick those up, or should i put all my movies into a movie folder, and put the corresponding folder with the nfo in there with it? thanks again.

Glad to hear that it's now working ok.:)
There is probably a bug somewhere that causes the program under specific circumstances returns a sharename or filename with an illegal character. I have put filters in to check them, and remove these characters, which has obviously worked in your case. But unless I have examples of those lines of XML to work with then its impossible for me to find what is causing it.

I'm not certain of how XBMC deals with nfo files and DVD or VIDEO_TS folders, maybe you could try a few things and let us know what works
In my own case while I do have several DVDs stored on my network I store them as ISO's. Movie.iso, Movie.nfo, and Movie.tbn work fine.

I will try this out tonight as well and post feedback.

Thanks for sharing!

-Wu

I'm having the same problem as Razor with it creating folders with $ in them. Could this be because in XBMC the SMB Shares have $ in them? I'd rather keep the hidden ($) shares as it makes network browsing for other family members easier.

Thanks
Michael

Suggestion: Current save option is root or bookmark name (in my case General). Can you further to export to the path for multipath bookmarks? Since I will be exporting in order to replace all the current plain link nfo files its far easier to have the path so I simply select the directory rather than hunting the list for the next one... even though they are in alphabetical order.

Incidentally I ran it and got 2300 files in @ 7 minutes doing full export WOOHOO!

Glad you liked it :laugh:

Not sure what you are asking for in the export of the files - could you explain in a bit more detail please

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Second when I try and dump .nfos it dumps most properly. another 270(out of approx 700) or so are dumped on my desktop.
The program returns 'all done' and the target directories are populated. But not all nfos are there. These missing nfos are dumped on my desktop.
If I change the 'backup folder' to, for example /desktop/nfo/ the nfo files are named 'nfoEnemy at the Gates.nfo' and are located on my desktop

Another question... in your app
[code]check or uncheck the boxes of tags you wish to be stripped at processing[code]
check OR uncheck... huh? Which one is it?
so if the box is checked that tag IS stripped?

Perhaps something like "Strip the following Tags at Processing" would be much more clear. I think everyone knows how to check and uncheck a checkbox :)

If you'd like a copy of the xml dump of my DB give me a PM and I'll email it. I have nowhere to host it at the moment. Its 7.41mb

Thanks again,
Let me know if I can assist any other way.

Thanks for the program - and be sure you're using XMBC.ORG, not xboxmediacenter.com - your link should be:

http://www.xbmc.org/wiki/index.php?title=Import_-_Export_Video_Library#Movie_nfo_Files

Found a problem - I checked "Replace Min in with 'Minutes'" and it replaced instances of min outside of runtime - it renamed all instances of "Terminator" with "Terminutesator"

Based on the discussion here [thumbnails (http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=31684)], would it be easier to open the actual database on the xbox, rather than parsing the exported xml file? If you were to read the database directly, you could pull out the same information, place it into the seperate .nfo files, and then pull the thumbs at the same time.

I actually just ran an automated scan on my movie collection overnight, which hopefully will be done by the time I get home from work, so I should have a huge test set of data to throw at this thing :)

Ill see if i cant find somewhere to dump it after work

If you've got a .net/Live account, you can use the new SkyDrive (http://skydrive.live.com/). It's 5 GB online storage, and if you want to share something, just put it in the public folder and then send someone the link.

' - '

' - '

will XMBC pickup the nfo? or we have to have a NFO scraper for movies just like for Music Vids.

tags are supposed to be there. we store the xml in order to allow multiple thumbs

as i said

would you like me to paste that part of my xml file?

I haven't had a chance to try this app out yet, but here's a feature suggestion: I find that when using library mode and collecting my info from IMDB, I end up with too many genres. I think it could be useful if your app allowed for the reassigning of genres, so that you could take some of the more obscure genres and assign them to a more "high-level" genre (e.g., assign both the Action and Adventure genres to just the Action genre).

Yes the DB will be populated from an available nfo file if it is available, thus saving the need for rescraping the information.

If your xml is only showing 1 imdb link for the thumbnail on imdb, then while the program will work fine, it it does mean that the movie was scraped with an older scraper. Newer scrapers get many thumbs from several locations including impawards and movieposterdb hence the ability to be able to select between the multiple thumbs. The actors section also contans a similar tag with a link to an image of the actor.

When you choose to change thumb in the XBMC movie info screen then it is the url from these thumbs that are loaded up. If you are storing these thumbs localy as tbn files and you are happy with the chosen thumb then you can strip this tag from your nfo's as it is not needed. Just check the strip tag to remove this line from your nfo.

Thx for your help - makes more sense now. Yes...I"m using an older version of XBMC - so I guess that accounts for the single IMDB thumb. I've just setup the latest version to trial before I upgrade.

So...just to clarify...if I have my thumbs setup locally as ".tbn", then I "DON'T" need a thumb location in the nfo file - because XBMC supposedly looks for the tbn first. Thx.

If we use our own nfo files to store all the imdb data, will that prevent the scraper from being able to grab actor thumbnails when we scan the movie?

Thanks for the info SleeyP. gonna download and start scraper this way.

billyad2000 great work. Thanks..

Thanks for this. I still see weird characters, example: "Ocean's.Eleven.CD2.nfo". Thanks again.
Sorry, was searching body for special chr$ but forgot to check filenames, this is fixed now:
Link to version 0.6b (http://www.mediafire.com/?thnwdgivtan)

billyad2000: any specifc reason you a targetting the .net 3.5 framework. why not use .net 2.0.

As I said earlier in this thread I've not been involved in any kind of programming for over 10 years, when I decided to have a go and do this program my initial impulse was to use VB 6, a version I used to be profficient at. However I decided that if I was going to get back into the programming habbit then it would be better to use the latest tools available, so I obtained Visual Studio 2008 and that meant .net 3.5.
Is there some disadvantage to 3.5 that I am unaware of. Let me know

But instead i went for the boring option of just copying and pasting everything to its own nfo.
Try doing that with 1000+ movies. far quicker to write this program.

Glad you liked it :laugh:

Not sure what you are asking for in the export of the files - could you explain in a bit more detail please

Example.. in XBMC I have bookmark general. This is a multipath bookmark
Drive-3DVD
Drive-4DVD etc.

Now.. when I run your wonderful lil piece of engineering I get
General
all nfo files

So I have to actually sort them and them place them in the proper share after they are extracted & created from the db. So I ask, is there a way to further sort when making them so they also place in a path under the bookmark name so its a simple select all and paste to my network share?

hehe, I have been a bit less active on here cuz the IT dept banned xbmc.org from the proxy, so until I figure out a way around it, I can't go on here from work anymores :( Anyways, I'll try to find any other bugs ASAP :P Love the progress this thing has been making!

Hi everyone, here is another update

It's more in the nature of a transition than anything else, and I wasn't going to upload at this point but there have been a few large modifications over the last week and I need this version to be tested more thoroughly than I can on my own.

The biggest change has been to the method of creating the savepath for the nfo files.
The XML is parsed and you now have the option to store each seperate path (upto 9 different paths), in a different location (The idea was to allow people to save nfo's and thumbs, directly to the correct folder). It seems to work ok but I would like people to test it out.

People who have each movie stored in its own folder also have the option to save the nfo and tbn directly to that movies folder. This option has to be selected before the videodb.xml is loaded. This allows the last part of the path(directoryname) to be stripped from the path while the xml is parsed for share roots.

Oviously the above only works for files stored locally on the machine the program is running on. If any files stored elsewhere such as on the XBox or on a NAS then the user will still be able to browse and select the location to store the nfo files and then transfer them manually. (In the case of a NAS running SMB then a network filepath would work OK)

Work on the TV nfo export is coming along and the first version should be ready within the next 10 days or so.

Download Version 1.94 (http://www.datafilehost.com/download-eea59af9.html)

All feedback as usual is appreciated ;)

so I exported my video db and ran the program. I have 750 Movies in the library it found 14 movies. ???

Regards,

Dave

Well yeah but the idea here is we're creating NFO files for storage alongside the movie files in our collections. Most of the userbase almost certainly already has TBN files stored locally. I know I do, and would prefer to not have extra stuff in the NFOs pertaining to thumbnails out on the web cuz I don't need that stuff. I think that yes, it should be optional.

*other feedback*
-Glad to see the tag is there, that rocks :) Now if only I had some good way of finding trailers that aren't linked via IMDB...
-It seems like a few tags could be removed or made optional given the intended use of the output files:
--
--
--
--
-Any possiblity of processing the space-based padding into tab-based padding? Thats just a personal XML formatting preference. I figure why have like 6 space characters when 2 or 3 tab characters are appropriate? Also on that note, it looks like you could trim the leading 4 spaces from each line and not change anything, just make the files a tiny bit smaller ;)

I am happy to finally begin having proper NFO files to play around with in my collection.
Any chance of making this open source?

:P
The program is now working brilliantly, and all of my feedback is entirely aesthetic stuff.
A few requests:
-would you be able to run a string replace on the whole doc and replace " " (4 spaces) with "" (nothing)? The spaces are not needed and unnecessarily bloat the output files a bit.
-Along similair lines, there's an empty line left at the end of each file which could be trimmed.
-Could the tag be added to the optional removal list? seems to be related to TV and is empty on ever file I have seen so far.

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-the final aesthetic tweak is: would it be possible to replace the string "min" found inside the tag with "minutes"?

These are all things I have been tweaking manually on the output, so I figured they might be of interest to you :) Awesome program!

Sorry, noob question (which I imagine will help other noobs)...

Just to clarify, this program is designed for multi-XBMC households where you're streaming movies from a central server and want to store the movie information alongside the movie, rather than within each XBMC device (e.g., modded XBox running XBMC), correct?

Does this run against the IMDB data already retrieved and stored on the XBox, or does it run against my directory of ripped movies and go and retrieve the IMDB data itself?

Once the initial mass conversion has been run, what is the proper/best procedure when adding a single new movie to your collection?

This can certainly be of benefit within multiple XBMC households, in that the movies only have to be scraped once from IMDB by any one of the xbmc's. While the movies would have to be scanned again on each XBMC the information would come from the .nfo file rather than the internet and would not only be far faster but would be 100% accurate.

It doesn't at this time scrape information from the internet in itself - it depends on the exported videodb.xml you can create via XBMC after having used XBMC to create a library. - In the future - I'm looking into the posibility including a scraper at some future time, but this won't be in the immediate future.

The way i've been updating the nfo files is to put new movies into a seperate temporary share - scrape them with XBMC, then at sometime in the future you can export the new videdb.xml, create the .nfo files, then move the movies and nfos where I want them, clean the XBMC database, then rescan. It Doesnt need to be done very often, maybe on a monthly basis, or just before installing a new version of XBMC.
I know this isn't an ideal solution but I am thinking about improvements and it's a lot better than having to re-scrape a large movie collection, especially on multiple XBoxes.

OK - I've done quite a bit of work on this today

this is release 1.0 Download (http://www.mediafire.com/?njcgcjnt302)

http://aycu25.webshots.com/image/44664/2000391766058973640_rs.jpg

Additional remove tags have been added to bring the .nfo file in line with that listed at
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index Movie_nfo_Files (http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.php?title=Import_-_Export_Video_Library#Movie_nfo_Files)

And a default settings Button added to remove all tags not related to movies.

While I don't expect to be adding anything more to this project there are a couple of things that I woud like to add but require further development of XBMC, namely an additional tag in the exported db which includes the thumbnail filename, this would allow me to add a section to retrieve the thumbs and rename them filename.tbn along with the .nfo file and additionally, I would like to see .nfo support for TV shows which at the moment take just as much time to scrape and organise as movies.

If anyone comes across a bug then let me know and I will do my best to fix it.

Thanx for all the feedback:D

I'm still figuring out how to name or place the .tbn so the scraper will automaticly picks them and adds the thumbnails to the library.

At the moment i have the .tbn next to my .avi with the same filenames:

DMoviesMovie.avi
DMoviesMovie.tbn
DMoviesMovie.nfo

The .Nfo is being picked up nice, but the thumbnail is still being downloaded from the net

Any idea's on this?

That file layout is perfect, I'm not sure what the problem is.

Did you select the tag to strip the moviethumbs tag from the nfo file, If the nfo contains movie thumbnail urls then maybe XBMC automatically uses them.

Let me know either way.

Billyad2000

Thanks for making this killer program! Today was my 1st time to try it out and all seems to be working except it grabs the actor thumb 1st instead of the Movie thumb? anyway to change this?

Keep up the good work!

tags are supposed to be there. we store the xml in order to allow multiple thumbs

Version 0.7b now ready:grin:
Link (http://www.mediafire.com/?jcvmdv3mdho)

Additional options added :
remove tag
remove all tags containing no data
remove all padding
overwrite option added - unless checked program will not overwrite existing files
replace "min" with "minute" in tag

Bugs fixed:
Error fixed if wrong xml was loaded

All attempts to remove extra blank line at end is defeating me at the moment, I can't find the cause for it.:sad:

as always - thanx for feedback

I was wondering, would it be possible to add an option just to write the IMDB-Url in the .nfo and not all the information?

And second, whenever i use this tool it makes directories called Movie$, everytime a $ added. (I tried with shares trought SMB and FTP) or does it only work on local movies?

In this way there is no 'fast' copying the nfo files to the movie dirs and it has to be done manually..

Is this a known 'problem' or am i just doing something wrong ;P

Thanks for the tool though, when i got more time i'll try again and then maybe manually copy the nfo files..

Also, I gotta get you FTP access to my site so you can stop using that ghetto host.

Sorry - hit the wrong button -

If you have a path :-
F:Movieshorror
You could have folder name -
FMovieshorror

or
smb://workgroup;password@computername/Movies3/

would be in folder -
smbworkgroup;usernamepassword@computernameMovies3

Would mean for some very long filenames though

so I exported my video db and ran the program. I have 750 Movies in the library it found 14 movies. ???

Regards,

Dave

I've not encountered this before, it sounds like your videodb.xml may be corrupt.
Are you using the latest version of the NFO extract program(1.92)

If not then try that one.

Youc can also open the videodb.xml in notepad and have a look at it it should contain 750 movies listed as below.

What Women Want
6.300000
2000
2
-1
0
-1
-1
33,480
After an accident, a chauvenistic executive gains the ability to hear what women are really thinking.
Nick, a somewhat chauvanistic advertising exec hot shot, has his life turned haywire when a fluke accident enables him to hear what women think. At first all he wants to do is rid himself of this curse, until a wacky psycologist (played to perfection by Bette Midler) shows him that this could be used to his advantage! His first target is Darcy McGuire, the very woman that got the promotion he wanted. But just as his plan is beginning to work, love gets in the way...
He has the power to hear everything women are thinking. Finally... a man is listening.
127 min
<thumb>http://ia.imdb.com/media/imdb/01/I/52/54/25f.jpg</thumb>
Rated PG-13 for sexual content and language.
false

smb://workgroup;password@computername/sharename/
tt0207201
smb://workgroup;password@computername/sharename/What Woman Want.avi
Comedy / Fantasy / Romance
Josh Goldsmith / Cathy Yuspa
Nancy Meyers

Centropolis Entertainment

Alan Alda
Dan Wanamaker

The most important tags for creating the file are
This shows where each movie nfo begins.
grabs the share folder or directory name from here
is you are saving just imdb urls then it will extract this for the movie url
The file name is extracted from here
The last line for this nfo

as long as these tags are ok then you should get them all output as .nfo files as far as my program is concerned the rest of the tags are irrelevent it merely filters the content for special chr$ and writes them back to the nfo file.

If you still can't get it working then all I can suggest is that you send the videdb.xml to me so I can have a close look at it, and see what the problem is, after you have removed security information obviously :D

If anyone else has had this problem then please let me know

"The Terminutesator!

cant seem to find that movie on IMDb :rofl:

already taken care of, but thanks anyways. (billy you have a PM)

Now....
Lets get back on to

Get an error when loading the XML..

Cannot select the Movie Paths afterwards (right collum is just empty)

Errorlog: http://www.pastebin.ca/962588

Just a few questions:

Approximately how many different sharepaths do you have?
and Do you have your each movie file stored in it's own folder, if so, did you check the box before loading the XML?

Either way, Try this one Version 1.95 (http://www.datafilehost.com/download-8b100803.html)

I think he's asking if nfo Import/Export functionality has been added to XBMC, which no it hasn't. It's still in the air of how to effectively and efficiantly add it. This program works great for now though til that is done in time.
So, i wanted to ask Billyad2000, are you going to add TV Series once we've all tested Spiff's addition/attempt and find it working fine? Or will you prefer to wait til it's been added to the trunk itself. I'm about to try his separate diff and build an xbox version to try out myself. And am so thankful that he took on project of adding it, since so many of us have been waiting for something like this to happen. THanks again Spiff!!!! Grumpy or not, we love ya man!!!

just ran the program across a 7 MB XML file with all processing options turned on. It took about 45 seconds to spit out 530ish files. SUPAR! hehe

I ran into one minor bug that only I will encounter: Because I had already gone in and fiddled with replacing "min" with "minutes" in the runtime tags, the result is a double-replace which looks like this: 110 minutesutes. Normal users will not encounter this error I don't think. Will post any actual bugs as soon as I find them, but as it stands I think this thing is just about perfected :)

Just to answer a few questions.

Billyad2000

Thanks for making this killer program! Today was my 1st time to try it out and all seems to be working except it grabs the actor thumb 1st instead of the Movie thumb? anyway to change this?

Keep up the good work!

I'm sorry about that, for testing i'm using an xml I exported a while ago, and the thumb tag doesn't contain any actor thumbnails. If you post an example of one of your thumb tags that contains actors aswell as movie thumbs i'll see if their is a way to filter them.
If not I am currently working on setting up a method by which all thumbs are shown then the user can just select whichever thumb they wish - much like XBMC but with the advantages of a more powerful PC platform and having the thumbs stored locally with the media and nfo files.

I was wondering, would it be possible to add an option just to write the IMDB-Url in the .nfo and not all the information?

In this way there is no 'fast' copying the nfo files to the movie dirs and it has to be done manually..

Is this a known 'problem' or am i just doing something wrong ;P

Very possible, just not sure why people would want that feature, the purpose of this program is mainly to avoid the need for rescraping, not only is scraping slow but the reliability of scrapers is also a problem due to page layout changes etc.
You are not doing anything wrong. Copying directly to the source movie folder would be extremely difficult due to the number of unknown possible combination of system shares and configurations. e.g. Their may be more than one PC serving movies, or what about NAS servers or even movies stored on the XBOX HD itself. Sorry but I can't at this time think of a way to make that happen. As long as you use unique sharenames for all of your folders, shared or otherwise then this program will copy the nfo's and thumbs into so named folders and it's just a case of using cut and paste.

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whenever i use this tool it makes directories called Movie$, everytime a $ added.
I'm having the same problem as Razor with it creating folders with $ in them. Could this be because in XBMC the SMB Shares have $ in them? I'd rather keep the hidden ($) shares as it makes network browsing for other family members easier.

This is a deliberate action of the software, the program adds the "$" to all folders containing network shares. The idea behind this was to try and give a bit of seperation between local and network files. For example a folder on the XBox called "Movies" and a network share called "Movies". In this instance the program adds "$" to the network share, so XBox hd folder nfo's would be stored in "Movies" and network share would be stored in "Movies$". This avoids all nfo files going into the one "Movies" folder.

As I said i'm working on methods for thumbnail selection at the moment but I will see about adding the options for removing the $ from folder names and for saving just the IMDB url in the info file in the near future if thats what you really want, let me know.

I which MeD's Movie Manager had this NFO export feature
http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=28741
http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=27990

http://xmm.sourceforge.net

would you like me to paste that part of my xml file?That would be very helpful.

Has the .nfo feature been added to XBMC yet?I'm not sure what you mean, but when you try to scrape a movie not in the db, if an nfo file exists then it grabs the data from there rather than imdb etc

Just a few questions:

Approximately how many different sharepaths do you have?
and Do you have your each movie file stored in it's own folder, if so, did you check the box before loading the XML?

Either way, Try this one Version 1.95 (http://www.datafilehost.com/download-8b100803.html)

Sorry.. think i forgot to check that box..

works now when i check the box.... when i dont i still get the error though..

looks like it works perfect further..

thanks and sorry for the late reply

Thanks for the changes Billyad it's working fine for me now that I can remove the $.

One thing I would like to request if it's not to much trouble is the ability to specify a top level folder and it automatically puts the nfo and tbn files in the appropriate sub-folder based on the file path in the xml file e.g.

I have my movies split into two folders under the same smb share called DVD's and Movies (I've listed the paths out of the XML file below).

smb://a;a:a@ip/Movies$/DVD's/Bring It On (2000)/Bring It On.avi
smb://a;a:a@ip/Movies$/Movies/Love Thy Neighbor/Love Thy Neighbor.avi

I'd like to be able to specify in your app that S:Movies is the root of the file path so that it knows to put the tbn and nfo for "Bring It On (2000)" in the "S:MoviesDVD'sBring It On (2000)" folder.

I don't know if anybody else would find this useful and your app as it stands is great and will save me a lot of time but this change will save me even more :grin:

I will definately be adding tvshow info support to this program, I am currently tidying up the current code, it's gotten quite messy over recent versions, but then i've just got a few small things to work out before I can start on the implementation.

As for when, I'm not quite sure.
On one hand I want to be doing this very soon, to encourage people to install and test spiff's diff, On the other hand, if I do, will people install spiff's patch and forget about the feedback part. I'll have to have a think about it.
Ultimately it's the users who will decide whether or not this great feature is included in XBMC.

BTW, I've read posts by people proposing that nfo files could be shared, I think this would be a great idea, maybe someone could look into setting up an FTP server for this purpose.

But then I thought some more, and realized my idea of reading the database directly would have the same FTP access problems that SleepyP pointed out in the thumbnails thread.

http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?p=176345#post176345

billyad2000: any specifc reason you a targetting the .net 3.5 framework. why not use .net 2.0.

As for the app awesome idea, I was considering making something like this as well. But instead i went for the boring option of just copying and pasting everything to its own nfo.

Hehe i was however working on a 'Movie Nfo' previewer. So it actually renders an nfo to a Windows Form, and how it would look in XBMC. (Did the part cheapy using a Sereializer), i haven't put in the effort for the rendering part yet

This will be great. Thanks!

Well you gotta remember that inside of XML, a lot of "special" characters are required to be encoded like that. Billy, when you generate the output filenames are decoding from "XML" style back to "regular"?
Here's the list I found with a quick Google
& - &
< - <
> - >
" - "
' - '
I believe the semi-colons are included in these chars...

one more potentially optional removable tag:

Probably would wanna remove it in multi-user environments like mine ;)

lets test it out

The program is available at the following link for testing

http://www.mediafire.com/?nmmyjlxh2ax

If you have problems running it please make sure you have the Latest .NET framework installed (version 3.5)
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/netframework/aa569263.aspx

Great app billy, thanks for the hard work.

I've having issues though. v1.95
First, I have my nfos stored on a linux based samba server. This server supports different characters in filenames than windows(fat32) does. Currently if the nfos are written to a filesystem that does not supports characters the program will crash. Some error handling may be in order. Perhaps the program should recommend writing to the share directly so the same charset is supported.

Second when I try and dump .nfos it dumps most properly. another 270(out of approx 700) or so are dumped on my desktop.
The program returns 'all done' and the target directories are populated. But not all nfos are there. These missing nfos are dumped on my desktop.
If I change the 'backup folder' to, for example /desktop/nfo/ the nfo files are named 'nfoEnemy at the Gates.nfo' and are located on my desktop

Another question... in your app
[code]check or uncheck the boxes of tags you wish to be stripped at processing[code]
check OR uncheck... huh? Which one is it?
so if the box is checked that tag IS stripped?

Perhaps something like "Strip the following Tags at Processing" would be much more clear. I think everyone knows how to check and uncheck a checkbox :)

If you'd like a copy of the xml dump of my DB give me a PM and I'll email it. I have nowhere to host it at the moment. Its 7.41mb

Thanks again,
Let me know if I can assist any other way.

Version 1.96 should address most of your problems. The program shouldn't crash anymore if a file cant be written. The Backup folder is compulsory now and if their is a problem with a file then it will be saved there. The error with the missing "" causing the nfomovie.nfo bug has been fixed.

"check or uncheck the boxes of tags you wish to be stripped at processing"
has been replace by
"Please Check The Boxes of Tags You Wish To Be Stripped At Processing"
Sometimes you look at something so often you dont see it :)

Had one additional question about the plans for this project,

I really like this tool and it works like a charm atm.. i have a .nfo file for all my movies now.

But when i want to add a new movie, the only way seems to add it in XBMC using the scraper, Export database and then parse XML and the .nfo will be created..

Are you planning in the future to some kind of port the XBMC-Scraper to your tool to just directly make a .nfo or not?

I know it will be a lot of extra work and adding TV-Show support now will be the first thing to go for.. but i was just wondering about the future ;)

I think I've fixed the bug that caused the crash when you failed to check the box, movies stored in individual folders. Would you check it for me please.

A scraper is certainly a possibility, but to be honest I haven't the first idea how to go about programming one, but who knows.

Here it is :- Version 1.96 (http://www.datafilehost.com/download-a1659068.html)
:D

"When you're running late, make sure you don't run into... The Terminutesator!"

Found a problem - I checked "Replace Min in with 'Minutes'" and it replaced instances of min outside of runtime - it renamed all instances of "Terminator" with "Terminutesator"

Update Version 1.01 Download (http://www.mediafire.com/?nmm9idv9cm0) :blush: :laugh: :blush: :laugh:

Also, anyone else getting lots of multiples / doubles in the tag? For some reason I have like the same writer or writers duped sometimes twice and sometimes even three times. Weird!

thanks, ill try this, i tried 1.92 on 2 different computers, and as far as i know, i dont have any illegal characters, unless the scraper put them in. Ill let you knowhow it goes, thx again.

Get an error when loading the XML..

Cannot select the Movie Paths afterwards (right collum is just empty)

Errorlog: http://www.pastebin.ca/962588

awesome program, thanks a lot, the problem mine has, is it kept crashing on a movie that had & in the title. i delelted that out of my xml file, and ran it again, it crashed on the next movie it got to with & in the title. Do you think it has a problem with movies with & in the title, or any symbols at all? Should I just go change all the & to and, do you think that would make it work? thanks, ive been wanting something like this for a long time now.

This is not a problem i've been able to duplicate, It seems to work fine for me with & in the filename. are you using the most up to date version
Latest version 1.92 (http://www.datafilehost.com/download-4d5537b1.html) The only way I can get an error like this is if I try to create a file with illegal characters in, namely / " : * ? < > are any of these contained in your xml filename.
or equally the filename could contain special xml characters which are translated into illegal characters:-
< is converted to <
> is converted to >
" is converted to "
these all contain the & symbol

also, when videodb.xml already content "minutes" it will change it to "minutesutes"SleepyP already pointed this one out. To be honest I didn't think it would effect anyone else but obviously I was wrong. It will be fixed at the next version.

Which program-language is this nfo creator coded in?, ...and do you plan to open source it?
This is written in VB.net 2008
I'll make the source available to anyone that wants it. Just don't expect it to be overly pretty. This is my first attempt at any kind of programme in over a decade and im only now starting to get the hang of the .net syntax.

I've noticed a minor issue with the thumbs. If the file has an apostrophe it saves the thumbs with an ' in the filename. It doesn't do that with the nfo file though. It correctly saves that with just a plan old '.

Awesome program btw, it's going to save me tons of time.

http://coastalrocket.blogspot.com/2007/10/tidying-up-movies-in-xbmc.html

I posted this a while back but since its all the same kind of thing it's worth a plug here. Mine's more concerned with creating NFO files for new movies as you drop them into your shared folder. It'll create a basic NFO file - pointing to the imdb url, and it'll create the folder.jpg and movename.tbn files.
where it was left off.

You must have been thinking along the same lines I was when you wrote this - It's a nice idea but no good for people like myself who don't store each movie in it's own subfolder - maybe an update could fix that

If i create a title tag in the NFO file is there any alterations on the xbmc side to pick this up? I remember reading a thread about this but can't remember where it was left off.

You mean this thread:- http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=30691

The answer is not yet

id's not being filled is a scraper bug and will be resolved shortly

This worked great! It took a 20mb xml file and spit out 779 .nfo files in just a couple seconds. Thanks!

I do have a question on how it handles movie and actor thumbnails though. When you go to import these movies again, will XBMC still be able to pull the thumbnail images down automatically if they aren't already downloaded into XBMCUserDataThumbnailsVideo?

And is this how the thumbnail extraction is suppose to work... with the double tag or is that a bug?

Eminem
Jimmy
http://ia.imdb.com/media/imdb/01/M/==/QM/xQ/zN/xY/jM/wc/TZ/tF/kX/nB/na/B5/lM/B5/VN/2I/jN/3g/TO/4g/TM/B5/VM._SY192_.jpghttp://ia.imdb.com/media/imdb/01/M/==/QM/xQ/zN/xY/jM/wc/TZ/tF/kX/nB/na/B5/lM/B5/VN/2I/jN/3g/TO/4g/TM/B5/VM._SY192_.jpg

it does neither, you must first have a database created by XBMC. Then you must export that database to an XML file.
This program only processes that XML file.

OK - Time for another update :grin:

I've now included limited support for .tbn files.

Keeping with the automated idea you can now choose for the program to download the first thumb located in the tag.
This will then be renamed as moviename.tbn and stored in the same location as the moviename.nfo

Obviously this slows down the program quite considerably since each thumb needs to be downloaded, but the overall time will depend on your internet speed. (It takes me about 15mins to download about 900 thumbs with a 4mb connection)

The program first creates all the individual .nfo's as previously but if the save thumbnail is selected it will then download and rename the thumbs.

Because of the increased processing time i've also added a progress bar and a cancel button for when it's downloading thumbs.

Download Here (http://www.datafilehost.com/download-550b6e03.html)

Any feedback on how to handle thumbnails would be apreciated, i'm sort of trapped between what functionality to add and the need for a fast, easy to use program. For example, I could add the ability for a user to browse all thumbnails, and select the one the require, or even include a web browser so they can select their own thumb, but this would take a long time for people with large movie collections.
Anyway, just let me know.

Slightly updated version

A couple of bugs removed and a checkbox added which allows you to save all nfo files to the root directory.

http://www.mediafire.com/?txazebbbz9m

Please note that this will not work with TV shows.
TV show nfo files are AFAIK not supported by XBMC
This is a great little app.
I noticed that it has a hard time with quotes, apostrophes and ampersands, however.
I've got lots of files with "&" in the filename, but a quick pass with Better File Rename will fix it right up.

Thanks for the great work, I see myself using this a lot.

Ohhh I gotta play with this!

Example.. in XBMC I have bookmark general. This is a multipath bookmark
Drive-3DVD
Drive-4DVD etc.

Now.. when I run your wonderful lil piece of engineering I get
General
all nfo files

So I have to actually sort them and them place them in the proper share after they are extracted & created from the db. So I ask, is there a way to further sort when making them so they also place in a path under the bookmark name so its a simple select all and paste to my network share?

It would be fairly easy to implement this - it's just the problem of understanding exactly how to implement it

For example if you have a path :-

Awesomecross, will let you know if I find anyting ;P

The last post brings to mind a bug that i missed, when the strip thumb is selected, all thumbs are stripped including actors thumbs.
I'll release a fix soon.

its working great for me.. Thanks

ah shit
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 17): 552 Message size exceeds fixed maximum message size: 10485760 byte
odd tho because the attachment is only 7.4mb

Ill see if i cant find somewhere to dump it after work

awesome man. I will try this out when I get home, I have a large collection (530+ movies, 140+ TV series) and thus probably a good test set to work with. Will post feedback ASAP

Uh-oh. I see music nfo support next now. LOL.

Had one additional question about the plans for this project,

I really like this tool and it works like a charm atm.. i have a .nfo file for all my movies now.

But when i want to add a new movie, the only way seems to add it in XBMC using the scraper, Export database and then parse XML and the .nfo will be created..

Are you planning in the future to some kind of port the XBMC-Scraper to your tool to just directly make a .nfo or not?

I know it will be a lot of extra work and adding TV-Show support now will be the first thing to go for.. but i was just wondering about the future ;)

Firstly, thx for this cool program. Spat out almost 800 movies in a couple of seconds.

I'm making the move to nfo files. I've read the wiki and many posts, but am still not sure I completely understand them.

So...XBMC will scrape these instead of an online site if these are available in the same directory as the movie. That must mean the DB relies on the info contained within the nfo to propogate the db.

Okay, after the conversion from the videodb.xml to the many nfo files, I find a "thumb" field that points to the IMDB site. I have seen this same field in the DB. How does this relate to thumbs that are stored locally as "tbn" files?

Yes the DB will be populated from an available nfo file if it is available, thus saving the need for rescraping the information.

If your xml is only showing 1 imdb link for the thumbnail on imdb, then while the program will work fine, it it does mean that the movie was scraped with an older scraper. Newer scrapers get many thumbs from several locations including impawards and movieposterdb hence the ability to be able to select between the multiple thumbs. The actors section also contans a similar tag with a link to an image of the actor.

When you choose to change thumb in the XBMC movie info screen then it is the url from these thumbs that are loaded up. If you are storing these thumbs localy as tbn files and you are happy with the chosen thumb then you can strip this tag from your nfo's as it is not needed. Just check the strip tag to remove this line from your nfo.

more TV series tags that don't need to be on movies (and correct me if I am wrong):



Thanks for the very quick fixes billy...



Still encountering issues.

The app keeps dumping nfos to my 'backup' directory.

The directories it writing to are completely empty and the app should be creating the full directory structure.

Some nfos are written.... some are not.



Is there any sort of logging I can enable to find out why its not able to write these? Perhaps if it could even just dump to a .log file it would be very useful to me.



In general the message upon completion is very misleading. Although in my case some files were unwritable I still get a 'all done' message. 



As well the app exits when completed which is a pain in the ass for me when im trying to test this thing and have to fill in five paths everytime I want to test. Perhaps the app could save previously used paths in a configuration file?

This would be useful to testers and end users alike



Thanks again

Loto


OK - Big update time

http://img260.imageshack.us/img260/7892/nfoexportmainpagege7.jpg



The biggest change in this version is now what I hope is the addition of a fully working thumbnail section. As you can see above you have 3 options:-



1) Extract the first thumbnail from the  tag.

This is done automatically and is the fastest option, although much depends on how fast your internet connection is.

The bug that returned only actor thumbs has now been fixed.



2)Use thumbnail browser to select from all available thumbs

For those who wan more choice over their thumbnails this will download up to 49 thumbnails and the user can choose any one:

http://img260.imageshack.us/img260/5478/nfoexportthumbnailpageut0.jpg



As you can see their is also a url button that lets you enter a direct url to any image you want and a skip button if you don't want a thumb for a particular title.



Clicking on a thumb opens a much larger preview window:

http://img260.imageshack.us/img260/3638/nfoexportbigthumbnailpayc2.jpg





On a minor note I've added the option to remove the "$" from at the request of a few people.



@Razor_109

I had added the option to save only the IMDB url to the .nfo file but unfortunately I had to take it out as XBMC is not exporting the IMDB id any more ( tags are now empty) - sorry





Oh yes - Get it here : Download (http://www.datafilehost.com/download-33a2b163.html)


Thanks for this.  I still see weird characters, example: "Ocean's.Eleven.CD2.nfo".  Thanks again.


Sent



Forgot to mention that the directory structure contains characters unsupported by NTFS/FAT32 and will not be able to write to your filesystem. (I write directly to a ext3 filesystem via SMB)



If you run into issues do a find/replace on the problem characters in the .xml


Sorry - hit the wrong button -



If you have a path :-

                               F:Movieshorror

You could have folder name - 

                               FMovieshorror



or

smb://workgroup;password@computername/Movies3/



would be in folder - 

smbworkgroup;usernamepassword@computernameMovies3



Would mean for some very long filenames though



Truthfully Im not worried anbout the "name" per say. Just some seperation method when choosing the path... I mena it could be:

Movies1

Movies2

Movies3



to allow for some seperation.


awesome program, thanks a lot, the problem mine has, is it kept crashing on a movie that had & in the title. i delelted that out of my xml file, and ran it again, it crashed on the next movie it got to with & in the title. Do you think it has a problem with movies with & in the title, or any symbols at all? Should I just go change all the & to and, do you think that would make it work? thanks, ive been wanting something like this for a long time now.


So...just to clarify...if I have my thumbs setup locally as ".tbn", then I "DON'T" need a thumb location in the nfo file - because XBMC supposedly looks for the tbn first.  Thx.



Thats right.


Version 1.93 is now available to download



Link (http://www.datafilehost.com/download-cc515348.html)



Several bugfixes



A seperate option has been added to seperate actors to movie in the last version selecting remove movie removed them all.



Anyone who has already renamed min to minutes will no longer get the minutesutes error :grin:



And finally their have been a couple of people who seem to be having problems with this program. I'm not 100% as to the cause since i'm not getting any much feedback and I can't duplicate the errors, but I have a few suspicions. Please try this version and let me know.


I was thinking of methods to back up the thumbnails but I now believe this is unneccesary. I'm not certain about this since i've not had cause to test it yet, however thumbnails are stored as a CRC hash of the filename and path, so as long as the filename and path don't change then XBMC will always find the correct thumbnail. If this is the case then the solution is to just back up the whole 

"XBMCUserDataThumbnailsVideo" folder. 

The thumbs are not stored in the DB and AFAIK XBMC just looks for thumbnails with the correct hash and uses them.



The path of my shares is as follows

smb://workgroup;password@computername/Movies2/movie.avi

In the above instance movie.avi is stored in a shared folder named "Movies2"

This means that even if i have to move a folder it would be an easy matter to keep the "Movies2" sharename, thus keeping the path correct for the same CRC hash.



I also asked about the double thumbnail tag earlier in this thread, it's not a bug, merely away to store multiple thumbnail URL's, as follows



thumbnail1 urlthumbnail2 url for multiple thumbs

or

thumbnail1 url for a single thumb



These are the URL's of the thumbnails that are downloaded when you select get thumbnail in the movie info screen.


Which program-language is this nfo creator coded in?, ...and do you plan to open source it?


I'm still figuring out how to name or place the .tbn so the scraper will automaticly picks them and adds the thumbnails to the library.



At the moment i have the .tbn next to my .avi with the same filenames:



DMoviesMovie.avi

DMoviesMovie.tbn

DMoviesMovie.nfo



The .Nfo is being picked up nice, but the thumbnail is still being downloaded from the net



Any idea's on this?


yes, XBMC will use local NFO files before it will go to the scraper.


I know the doubles aren't your fault, just thought it was weird, especially cuz its been very inconsistent. Any chance you could have the program do any string processing or look for duplicate strings? I know that would be tricky as far as the looping and whatnot goes, but it would be fracking awesome.



Also, what do you guys think about an option to skip / remove tags that are empty?





Where was the last debate on wednesday with Mccain and Obama?
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