Naming to get movie metadata?

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Hub Discussions
1

I need some help.  Can’t get the metadata service function/service to lookup the meta data and I was wondering if it has to do with the naming?  I have copied all of the files over as they work from Windows Media Server w/ the mymovie.xml 7 .nfo files.  The movie art is showing, however the genre, actor, etc. is not filledout.

What am I missing? 

The directory names have the year in them like so ‘Avatar (2009)’  do I have to remove the year from each to have the service work? 

2

XML files and NFO files (a la XBMC) do NOT work with the Hub, so you can just delete them.   

Second, the service is NOT automatic like it is on Boxee and others.   

You have to go to each movie, hit the OPTIONS button, and select GET CONTENT INFO.

3

THANKFULLY its not automatic. This lets you pick what movies you want to use this function, and what movies you want to do yourself.

4

Depending on how the movies are viewed the information doesn’t show.  In other words I have each move in a directory named the same as the movie file (-minus ext.)  In Movie FOLDER view it shows the thmbnail but not the meta data?  Should I just copy over the movie files and get rid of the folders?

As far as retrieving the information, Thank you for the confirmation. I just bought three of these for Xmas and was trying to skip the 3+ hours on each for getting the information on all the movies that have info.  If I wasn’t preloading I’d be more aggreable to your point of view.

5

FunkyNails wrote:

Depending on how the movies are viewed the information doesn’t show.  In other words I have each move in a directory named the same as the movie file (-minus ext.)  In Movie FOLDER view it shows the thmbnail but not the meta data?  Should I just copy over the movie files and get rid of the folders?

 

As far as retrieving the information, Thank you for the confirmation. I just bought three of these for Xmas and was trying to skip the 3+ hours on each for getting the information on all the movies that have info.  If I wasn’t preloading I’d be more aggreable to your point of view.

If you’re in FOLDER view, you still have to go INTO the folder to where the movie file itself exists to view the Metadata for the file.  

Can you confirm that that works?

Assuming it does, I can tell you this:

The HUB has no dependencies on folders the way XBMC and Boxee do.   In fact, I favor that about the Hub…  It lets you organize your movies and shows however you wish, whereas XBMC and Boxee both almost demand that every file be in its own folder.

I’m hoping that the Hub, in the near future, will support XML metadata provided by the USER, after which case the Metadata creators that make NFO files and the like will possibly be able to translate NFO into XML that the Hub can read, and the necessity for doing GET CONTENT for every little thing will be reduced.  

6

I’ve found that the extra-info search engine is rather primitive. Examples:

.avi file named  “Clearing, The.avi”   info not found.

.avi file named "The Clearing (2004).avi:  info not found.

But if simply named “The Clearing.avi” then it finds the extra info.

It is possible, when looking up the info, to scroll over to the keyboard thingie, change the search name, re-submit, and then find the proper stuff. Then when the extra info is saved the displayed movie name is corrected but the file is not actually renamed. I did this a couple of times for testing, but find it a pain to do with just the remote. It would be much easier if I plugged in a usb keyboard.

7

It can also help to search for the movie using a webbrowser.   

www.themoviedb.org

Their search engine is a bit screwy, and sometimes you have to find the “Mojo” on how to search before it will return the correct results.

For example on mine, one of my kids’ movies “Sprit: Stallion of the Cimmarron”  is not found.   It has to be “Spirit Stallion…” without the colon.    A few months ago, it had to have a HYPHEN.

That’s one bad thing about MovieDB is that data changes so frenetically and can affect results for no apparent reason…

8

I may have lied. It looks like the syntax of NFO files is pretty much identical to the Hub XML, though not all of the tags are used. The OUTER tag is also different; in XBMC it is MOVIE, and in Hub-speak it is DETAILS. If the hub just ignores the outer tag, it looks like NFO SHOULD work! Crossing fingers, that’d be very smart of WD chose to use the same format as a defacto standard…