I have a ton of movies in a number of different formats (DVD folders, avi, mpg) and I have no idea whether they are all worth watching. So I was looking for a program to scan through the files, add the rating from IMDB and help my find the good, the bad and the ugly movies. Here is what I did …
- Install XBMC
- “Add source”- the root folder on my external hard drive
- XBMC can now scan all files and folders and retrieve IMDB’s movie information. Problem: some of the filenames are so cryptic, that XBMC cannot find them. So I had to manually correct the filenames. Ideally, filenames adhere to “Titel (Year)”. Helpful was a little tool that renames files with the help of regular expressions. A number of filenames can be easily stripped of unnecessary information with simple
\[Nero\]
or\(DE\)
. - Set the source format of the root folder
- Set content to “Movies”
- Always choose “imdb.com” as scraper. If you pick more than one scraper (themoviedb.org, etc.), the ratings get mixed up.
- If XBMC cannot find a movie (the cover icon has not been replaced), go back to step #3. Maybe add “part 1”, “part 3” or change the scraper from
akas.imdb.com
togerman.imdb.com
. Don’t forget to re-scan the source. - Your’re done.