Help with custom generated movies.xml file

[chrisg]

I have lots of movies and tv shows stored on multiple network drives. I have them arranged hierarchically (for tv shows for instance, x:/video/showname/season #/episode title/video_ts.ifo would be a typical file).

This causes a few problems with xlobbys automatic database stuff. I end up with two tv directories since I have two different shares with tv directories.

In addition, I wanted some more features - like also ability to list movies by genre, recently added, etc (having the same movie show up in multiple folders).

I undertsnad that there are ways to do this using third part programs to maintain the db and then importing it.

But I didn't want to keep the information in a separate program - I just wanted to be able to tag the files and then rescan, and handle genre by storing text files in the movie directory, and automatically handle "recently added".

So, being a programmer, I wrote a perl script to scan all my directories, and generate the movies.xml file. This all works and I now have some features I didn't have before.

But - whats the best way to integrate this scanning process with xlobby? right now I have to quit xlobby and then run my perl script to build a new movies.xml, and hitting the "rescan" button will probably cause something weird to happen.

Ideally xlobby would just notice that the file had changed and reload it. I'd just make my script run every once in a while.

any ideas?

Thanks!

[art]

You don't need to quite XL to re-load db, just run your script and when it's done try category>refresh command.

[chrisg]

Here's that I get with the movies database generated with my perl script:
- recently added section
- virtual folders by genre, cast, and directors and imdb ratings
- plot and tagline summary
- joiining folders across multiple drives
- virtual folders for series or groups of movies (like all godzilla movies in one virtual folder)
everything is downloaded from the imdb automatically

shots:
http://img126.imageshack.us/img126/5728/genreske3.jpg
http://img116.imageshack.us/img116/8982/movies1hn3.jpg
http://img178.imageshack.us/img178/3642/moviewo9.jpg
http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/824/movies2ha0.jpg

[P3rv3rt B3ar]

i dont know if its too much to ask...

but if u could convert the script so that u could input xlobby movies.xml file to it, it would check <imdb>imdbtitle#</imdb> tag for each movie in the file and pad the file with extra information available from imdb... it would be veeery useful for me personally, and possibly many other xl users.

[chrisg]

Do these tags have the imdb id # for the movie in them to resolve ambiguity? I'm looking up the movie from the idb based upon directory name, but I also made it that if there is a file called "imdb_id.txt" in the directory with the movie, it wil use that id for the lookup (in the case where it guesses the title wrong for ambiguously-named movies).

i dont know if its too much to ask...

but if u could convert the script so that u could input xlobby movies.xml file to it, it would check <imdb>imdbtitle#</imdb> tag for each movie in the file and pad the file with extra information available from imdb... it would be veeery useful for me personally, and possibly many other xl users.

[P3rv3rt B3ar]

Do these tags have the imdb id # for the movie in them to resolve ambiguity?

Yes exactly, imdb id #, i added it long time ago manually in order to crosslink movie page into imdb and also for linking with corresponding OST... It would be great if it could be useful also for fetching imdb specific info like current imdb rating into xlobby by running a script!!

[chrisg]

I can think about how to fit that in..it seems like my usage pattern is different than yours - I don't maintain any database - I generate a database from all of my movie directories, based upon filenames, plus meta data stored in files with them (with said metadata being fetchable from imdb). Every time I run my script, movies.db is thrown away and regenerated from scratch.