Managing my media on the SMP

Hello all,

I’m new here and somehwat in awe of the amount of knowledge on display.

For background, I’m a new owner of the smp and am very imoressed with it (I’ve previously owned Iomega Screenplay and LG smaet TV upgrader with plex as my media players). That experience aside, I’m very new to scraping and xml and am hoping that someone can answer a few questions for me regarding the SMP (forgive me if they have been asked already).

Q1. For TV shows, is there a way that I can have xml info at the Series and Season folder levels? My TV shows are organised as follows:

24

     Season 1

           24.S01E01.mkv

           24.S01E02.mkv          

           etc

     Season 2

           24.S02E01.mkv

           24.S02E02.mkv          

           etc

So in the example above, when I browse to TV shows, I’d like to see a general summary of the Show 24 when I’m at the root of my TV Shows folder, and similarly when I drill down a level, I’d like to see a summary of each season.

Q2. For Movies - sometimes my movies show with French or Spanish artwork - is there a way to force the metadata look up to return the English version

Q3. Can anyone provide a guide on themes? Which ones have been proven to work and step by step on how to install them

Q4. If my movie or TV show can’t be found in the only database can I manually prepare the xml and meththumb files?

Sorry for all of the questions, but I’m enjoying this player so much, I want to have everything set up perfectly.

Q1-  No, unfortunately not.   There is an “IDEA” for this in the Ideas Lab.   I would recommend you vote for it.

Q2-  No, several people are reporting this.   It’s probably a bug between TMDB and WD.  Apparently TMDB changed their API and no longer send only the local language; they send ALL languages.   So if a foreign cover has the most “Votes,” that’s what the WD will fetch.

Q3- Check the Hub’s THEME subforum.   It’s pretty much the same, and the SMP is described there, as well.

Q4- Absolutely.  

Thanks for the response. Shame about number 1 - I’ll vote!

For answer 4, if I just copy, paste and edit the xml file for a movie that was found in the DB will that work or do I need to rescan or anyhthing like that?

  1.  If you REPLACE or CHANGE an XML file with a new one, you’ll need to rescan.   If you add an XML file at the same time you add a movie, and thus before the SMP does its own rescan, it should pick it up automatically.