How to Optimize your media for XBMC with Media Renamer and Media Companion
XBMC is an awesome open-source media center and when you want to have the best experience with it, you want to optimize your media to make that happen.
When I started using XBMC, my media looked somehting like this
\Downloaded\
……………\Behind Enemy Lines[2001]DVDrip[ENG]-PZE\
……………………….\Behind Enemy Lines[2001]DVDrip[ENG]-PZE.avi
…………….\MythBusters.S07E12.Knock.Your.Socks.Off.HDTV.XviD-FQM.avi
Sure this plays alright with XBMC of course and all you need is the path to it. But XBMC lets us do more than that. For example, on library mode it allows you to view all of your movies with movie posters and fan-art, depending on your XBMC skin. You can also tell XBMC to do the ’scraping’ automatically and I’m going to show you is how you can do that with
The skin that I’m using right now is the MediaStream Redux. There are more skins here and if you’re new to XBMC I suggest you start with the default Project Mayhem 3 first.
If you rename your media using media renamer you can get organize your media in a better way. Media Renamer gets the media info from TheTVDB.com and TheMovieDB.org for the correct movie or episode title.
For example, in this case if it ’scraped’ Behind Enemy Lines
I would get the information on this page like so:
First you tell Media Renamer which folder you want to scan. use the '...' box and point to your media folder. After you press start scan the files inside your folder appear.
As you can see, there is a TV Series tab and Movies tab so you can rename files correctly accordingly.
After you selected the files you want to rename, go ahead and press the ‘Rename Selected Episodes’ button. The time to rename these files depends on how many you have. This took less than a second. You can now go into the folder and see the files you just renamed. Notice it only renamed the files and not the folder, so at this time want to rename the folder exactly as the file name.
Now I have a folder like this:
\Downloaded\
………\Behind Enemy Lines (2001)\
………………\Behind Enemy Lines (2001).avi
………..\MythBusters – 7×12 – Viewer Special Threequel.avi
Now after the media renaming is done, I went ahead and created new folders and moved the files into those folders so I can organize them better like so:
\Movies\
…….\Behind Enemy Lines (2001)\
………………\Behind Enemy Lines (2001).avi
\TV Shows\
……\Mythbusters\
…………\Season 7\
……………….\MythBusters – 7×12 – Viewer Special Threequel.avi
Now we whip out Media Companion to ’scrape’ the Media info, posters, and those cool fan-arts. Media Companion gets the fancy posters and fan-art off of MoviePosterDB and TVDB.
Open Media Companion, go to Preferences>Folders and add the folders that contain your media.
Press the 'Search for new movies' button and let the program do it's thing.
