Bruji

Hey all,

I was playing around with Front Row, Boxee, and Plex recently and it would be great to have some sort of integration with DVDpedia.

I'm having a tough time deciding which of the three to stick with. Love how DVDpedia plug-in works with Front Row, and ulitmately would like to be able to click on a movie and have it play....as it does in Boxee and Plex.

I'm wondering if there is any way for DVDpedia to scrape (I think the term is?) my video collection like Boxee and Plex do almost effortlessly, then I could use Front Row? The thought of manually linking my pedia collection with video files on an external drive doesn't excite me as I've got 600+ movies.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Currently I search DVDpedia for a movie to watch, then use Spotlight to locate it on my HDD--but it's not very sexy especially when I have people over.

What are you guys doing with your collections?

DVDpedia can handle a drag of a folder and will go looking for all the movie files in it. At the moment it will create new entries for movie files that are not yet linked within DVDpedia. You would need it to associate the files to movies already in DVDpedia. This is a bit tricky as the files on the drive tend to have little information associated with them. Based on the file name alone it would require a very smart algorithm to make those matches. What is the current setup of your files on the drive, do they have extensive metadata or .nfo files in the same folder? We are planning on improving the program to work more closely with the other formats, so that users can more freely exchange data. For example update information from linked .nfo files on the fly and vice-versa.

Conor, as always, thanks for your indepth and timely responses.

Currently, each 700mb DivX movie file sits in a roughly 120GB folder on an external HDD sorted by genre (connected to macbook pro with smartcard e-sata). For the most part, I have not bothered to keep the nfo that may have been included in the torrent. There are 8 of these 120GB folders in total.

Plex actually scraped my HDD folders without the nfo in about 10 minutes, and attached the correct summaries and DVD covers from imdb! I was blown away by this to say the least. Boxee was a little less successful reading my sometimes cryptic file names. I had to manually search about 20% of the files and attach profiles to them.

I likely prefer Plex GUI overall, but I was thinking that it practically duplicates some of the DVDpedia features of tracking and summaries (although not as detailed), but I'd much rather be searching through DVDpedia than Plex's interface. A plex plug-in ultimately would be awesome, I think a few other pedia users have brought this up.

I was hoping DVDpedia users might share their set-up using OSX media centers, combinined with DVDpedia and how they access their films on an external hard drive.

I believe these are the general file naming rules for Plex:

Plex works best when the format of the movie is "Title (year) CDx.extension".

Title should be the full title that appears in IMDB. IMDB also keeps track of the alternate title for release in foreign countries so that is valid too. If there is any ":" replace it with "-". eg: The Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King (2003)
CDx is optional of course. It can be CD1, CD2, etc.

Subtitles follow movie rules and appear in the same folder.

For TV series use "Title/Season 1/Title S01E01 Episode title.extension". Plex is able to download the episode title once it recognizes the title S01E01 part.

Plex is also able to download the movie posters.


If anyone has a script to rename dvdpedia movies to this format please let me know.

It's not a mac program but I use media renamer (run it through parallels) and it updates movie files to title (year) format and pulls the episode names from thetvdb.com as well. Very handy little program.

a little related...
i want to get a box soon to stream from hulu, netflix etc AND to play my movies off my hard drive. i was leaning towards a boxee box, but i don't want to abandon all of the wonderful information stored within dvdpedia. i love the apple tv plugin for dvdpedia, but then i couldn't plugin an external hard drive. is there any solution that will allow me to stream video from some of the main sites (hulu and netflix), all while playing movies from my hd with dvdpedia's information displayed?
any help would be greatly appreciated!

The linking section is generic and would allow for links to Hulu and Netflix. This is something that we haven't tested specifically but will now look into to add more integration if these links are present. Of course these links would not work in the plug-in as they will be seen as HTTP links and not actual movie files.