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Cleaning up movie collection - HunterZ - 2019-04-20

So I've got a collection of movies built up over time. It's a mess:
  • Some movies are split into pieces
  • Some movies are in folders, while others are in the main movie folder
  • I have multiple editions of some movies
  • Some movies don't get detected as the correct one by Kodi's scraper

What (if any) is the best approach for doing each of the following:
  • Getting movies out of the main folder and into subfolders, preferably grouped by set (series/collection)
  • Renaming moves to something that Kodi's scraper will recognize
  • Merging split movies?
  • Wrangling multiple editions of the same movie

I can do all this manually, but it would take a lot of work. I'm sure people have created some tools to help with some of it.

Thanks!

P.S. I randomly tried Media Companion, and I don't think it's what I need:
  • The UI is insane
  • As soon as I told it where my movies were, it proceeded to spend almost an hours pooping files all over my movies folder tree
  • Creates duplicate entries for split movies instead of making stacks like Kodi does
  • Doesn't help with merging split movies, because it wants to use something called mkvmerge-gui that no longer exists at the provided link


RE: Cleaning up movie collection - DaVu - 2019-04-20

(2019-04-20, 01:41)HunterZ Wrote: Some movies are split into pieces

Not sure what those files are, but if those are rar'd files then you simply unrar them and you should get a single movie file then. If those files are multiple mkv's for example, then probably mkvtoolnix might be a good tool to merge them. If you don't want to fiddle around with merging movie files, take a look at:

https://kodi.wiki/view/Naming_video_files/Movies#Split_Video_Files
 
(2019-04-20, 01:41)HunterZ Wrote: Some movies are in folders, while others are in the main movie folder
That's simply up to you and you can use any filebrowser/file-management tool to create folders and copy/move those movies which are in the main folder (I suspect you mean the source by talking about the "main folder) to their respective subfolders
 
(2019-04-20, 01:41)HunterZ Wrote: I have multiple editions of some movies
That will be future feature of Kodi: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/14972

Handling multiple versions of the same movie can still be done. But you have to do that manually. Maybe that's way to compicated, but I do that by editing the NFO files. So I scrape my movies, let them export to nfo files, edit the nfo file and add something like "extended" to the title and refresh the info. In that way I can be sure it has been scraped fine before and will be listed as its own entry in the library.
 
(2019-04-20, 01:41)HunterZ Wrote: Some movies don't get detected as the correct one by Kodi's scraper
That's most likely the case of an incorrect naming of the files. Please check https://www.themoviedb.org/ search for the movie in question and make sure you named it in the exact way. If you have your movies stored in their own folders make sure the foldername matches the moviename and also make sure you enabled that setting at the scraper settings "Movies are in folders matching the movie name".

If the movie is not shown at TMDB then we can't do anything in regard of the scraping. Kodi is only able to fetch information from that site if that site has the information. You could create an account and add the info so others will benefit from it as well, or you could also create a movie nfo manually to get the specific movie into your library. See: https://kodi.wiki/view/NFO_files/Movies

RE: Cleaning up movie collection - HunterZ - 2019-04-20

(2019-04-20, 09:57)DaVu Wrote: Not sure what those files are, but if those are rar'd files then you simply unrar them and you should get a single movie file then. If those files are multiple mkv's for example, then probably mkvtoolnix might be a good tool to merge them. If you don't want to fiddle around with merging movie files, take a look at:

https://kodi.wiki/view/Naming_video_files/Movies#Split_Video_Files
It's generally "CD1" "CD2" type stuff. Kodi stacks it fine, but the one tool I've tried (Media Companion) didn't seem to handle that (treated each piece as a separate copy of the movie). I started merging them manually to single mkv's with avidemux, and then discovered it doesn't handle DTS well so I've switched to mkvtoolnix - which is harder to use but works correctly (and I also like how it lets me append each piece as a "chapter" so I can remember where the split points were if needed).
 
Quote:That's simply up to you and you can use any filebrowser/file-management tool to create folders and copy/move those movies which are in the main folder (I suspect you mean the source by talking about the "main folder) to their respective subfolders
Yeah, I'll probably just suck it up and do it by hand. I want to get to where every movie is in a subfolder of its own, as apparently there's a setting in Kodi that lets it take the folder name into account.
 
Quote:That will be future feature of Kodi: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/14972
...If it gets merged, which I hope it does!
Quote:Handling multiple versions of the same movie can still be done. But you have to do that manually. Maybe that's way to compicated, but I do that by editing the NFO files. So I scrape my movies, let them export to nfo files, edit the nfo file and add something like "extended" to the title and refresh the info. In that way I can be sure it has been scraped fine before and will be listed as its own entry in the library.
What tools do you use to do this?

This is why I was checking out Media Companion, but it's way too complicated and aggressive.
Quote:That's most likely the case of an incorrect naming of the files. Please check https://www.themoviedb.org/ search for the movie in question and make sure you named it in the exact way. If you have your movies stored in their own folders make sure the foldername matches the moviename and also make sure you enabled that setting at the scraper settings "Movies are in folders matching the movie name".
This - along with the multiple editions things - is exactly why I'm wanting to clean up my library. I was hoping some tools could help me do it that didn't have a huge learning curve or spraying files all over my library without asking.

RE: Cleaning up movie collection - DaVu - 2019-04-20

In regard of editing xml files after scraping and exporting I'm using any kind of editor which is handy. Generally I'm a command-line guy and I prefer using vim. But nearly every text-editor is capable of doing that.

RE: Cleaning up movie collection - HunterZ - 2019-04-20

(2019-04-20, 18:13)DaVu Wrote: In regard of editing xml files after scraping and exporting I'm using any kind of editor which is handy. Generally I'm a command-line guy and I prefer using vim. But nearly every text-editor is capable of doing that.
But what do you use to generate the XML/NFO files before you hand-edit them?

RE: Cleaning up movie collection - DaVu - 2019-04-21

(2019-04-20, 19:22)HunterZ Wrote: But what do you use to generate the XML/NFO files before you hand-edit them?

Kodi Wink

https://kodi.wiki/view/Settings/Media/Library#Export_library

RE: Cleaning up movie collection - NeoCortex - 2019-04-21

(2019-04-21, 13:06)DaVu Wrote:
(2019-04-20, 19:22)HunterZ Wrote: But what do you use to generate the XML/NFO files before you hand-edit them?

Kodi Wink

https://kodi.wiki/view/Settings/Media/Library#Export_library 

If all I'm doing is handling multiple versions of the same movie, I don't even do that.  I just use the context menu once it's in the library and Edit Title.  That's usually enough for me in those instances.

RE: Cleaning up movie collection - HunterZ - 2019-04-21

(2019-04-21, 20:14)NeoCortex Wrote:
(2019-04-21, 13:06)DaVu Wrote:
(2019-04-20, 19:22)HunterZ Wrote: But what do you use to generate the XML/NFO files before you hand-edit them?

Kodi Wink

https://kodi.wiki/view/Settings/Media/Library#Export_library 

If all I'm doing is handling multiple versions of the same movie, I don't even do that.  I just use the context menu once it's in the library and Edit Title.  That's usually enough for me in those instances.
This is what I've been doing, but I've had to redo it a couple times now after library rebuilds, so I need something that Kodi can scoop up on a library rebuild for those few cases. I'll experiment with NFO/XML once I finish cleaning up my movie folder tree.