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HOW-TO create fake files for your offline movie collection - Printable Version

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HOW-TO create fake files for your offline movie collection - vorce72 - 2009-01-11

Hi,

here you have the procedure I followed to update my XBMC video library with the content of my offline DVD collection. Maybe it can be interesting for other people.

Scenario:
I have lots of DVD's, VHS' and Laserdiscs already archived on the "My Movies" section of http://www.imdb.com. I simply created a new category for each support and added the corresponding movies using the "Add to My Movies" feature of IMDB. Since I didn't plan to convert all my DVD's into avi's, I decided that it would be cool to have, at least, all of them listed nicely on my XBMC, so that I could browse my Video Library and choose what to watch.

Steps
  1. Go to the My Movies section
  2. Filter for the corresponding category
  3. Copy the whole table with all the movies
  4. Paste this text either in Notepad or Excel
  5. I choose Excel, pasting as plain text, so I could easily get rid of the columns I don't need.
  6. Discard everything except movies titles (eg: "Dracula (1931)")
  7. Save as "movies.txt" (or whatever)
  8. Put this txt in an empty folder
  9. Open a DOS prompt
  10. Type the following:
  11. Code:
    for /F "eol=; tokens=1* delims=," %i in (movies.txt) do @echo.> %i.txt
  12. This code creates an empty txt file for each line in the movies.txt file. I did not write this code, simply copied from another forum, so I suppose it can be modified to better suit our needs
  13. Once you have all these txt files, simply rename all of them as avi's or vob's and upload them in a folder of your choice of XBMC.
  14. Set content and scan them to your Video Library.
  15. Done.

Advantage: instead of using a program, it's just a simple line of DOS commands. For us Windows noobs, it's the easiest solution.

Disadvantage: if you have commas or special characters in the titles, they will be handled incorrectly. Substitute them with underscores before applying the batch command. Or modify the code accordingly (I can't do it).

Best regards

Marco

- stacked - 2009-01-11

I did something similar to this with a python script.

A better method for making the dummy files would be to use your movie list with this program:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=40329&highlight=Offline

Given a list of movies, it will create dummy avi and nfo files.

btw, can a mod move this to the How-To Guide thread?