Scraping in Vero 4K+ For A Newbie

Help and Support Vero 4K / Vero 4K +
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Hi All,

Forgive the plethora of n00b here, but wanted to make sure I wasn’t making too much of a fool of myself and/or trying to make things happen that aren’t really possible.

Got my 4K+ this morning, and absolutely LOVING it so far. Have set up all the relevant video/audio/subtitle options, and it’s working beautifully.

My setup is as such:

A WD 6Tb (formatted in NTFS - I know, I know… I’ll reformat it in ExFat soon!) is connected via USB. I’m using Optical out to go into a set of Logitech Z906’s. That side all works beautifully.

One of the main reasons I got on board the Vero train was we were interfacing the 6TB drive through our TV. The TV itself really didn’t like a 6TB drive, and also owing to the archaic interface on the TV, I had to manually switch between Dolby Digital and DTS output, depending upon what the file featured.

So, my drive is filled with 10 folders, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s etc. all the way up to 2018. All the files are repackaged and renamed MKV files with either DTS, AC3, DTS-HD MA audio and stripped of all but the forced English subs.

From the reading I’ve been able to do so far, seems that by me doing that (removing or modifying some of the metadata and deleting the NFO file) means I’m unable to ‘scrape’ data from the online utilities to get poster artowrk/synopses etc.

My question is; is there a way around that? The files all have common sense filenames, such as Avengers Infinity War.mkv. Is there not an online facility that can use that admittedly limited metadata to bring in details?

One other (small) thing… is it possible to ‘pin’ folders from the USB HDD to the Home Menu? So, for instance, have the:

1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
2015
2016
2017
2018

…folders present on the root/home menu? No problem if not, just something that would save a few clicks and would make it even simpler for my far less tech friendly housemates (which is one of the reasons I’ve gone down this route).

Aside from that, I’m really very happy with the box so far. It’s an absolute marvel!

Cheers,
Tom

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If the file names are like you describe, the Universal Movie Scraper should have very few problems. If you added the year to the filename, it would make it even better. This problem is also really a Kodi issue, not OSMC. See the Kodi wiki for details.

You can add items to the home menu like you want, but that could make it fairly long. A better way is to use a single menu item and have the sub-menu be the decades/years. Either way, you’d need to use a smart playlist.

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Indeed, likely the folder structure that is not compatible. A work around could be to add each folder 80s,90s,etc. Kodi will support multiple source locations.

5

Check what Kodi does:
https://kodi.wiki/view/Naming_video_files/Movies
https://kodi.wiki/view/Naming_video_files/TV_shows

Exists also for Music BTW. Just check the Wiki.
I have used “filebot” which now runs only under Windows/Mac and has become payware, but did a very good job in naming the movies/TVShows to be detected correctly by the scrappers.
Music I had done everything right in the MP3 Tags and it worked nice.
Best would of course be, as you are at the beginning, to have a script that renames the parts that are wrong.

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Thanks so much for all the detailed help, guys.

I ended up dumping the folder structure and placing everything in the root. A few things didn’t scrape correctly, but just needed the year adding in the filename, and it all worked beautifully!

Cheers,
Tom

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Being a Unix/Linux person, I choked a little when someone said they were moving to exFAT from NTFS.

Why not use a native Linux file system like EXT4?

exFAT doesn’t have journalling. I wouldn’t touch a file system like that since around 2000 on a spinning disk. Journalling handles file corruption better.
Unix systems care about user, group and 32-bits of permissions settings.
There’s also a performance issue with using non-native file systems like exFAT or NTFS on Unix systems. They use FUSE drivers which have been much slower than kernel drivers. Much slower.
There are good reasons to use exFAT or NTFS if you plan to manage the storage with a physical connection directly to Windows, but of you are doing it over the network, then there is ZERO need for that. Any Linux boot CD/Flash drive can be used to read and repair an ext4 file system, should that ever be needed.

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Usually exFAT is a suitable compromise for those that want to use the drive in windows as well.

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Good to know.

My video recording equipment doesn’t support exFAT, just FAT32 and NTFS, but I quickly move it onto native storage on my Ubuntu-based NAS system for reasons already mentioned.

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I’m prepping my Movie and TV files on my NAS in preparation of the arrival of my Vero 4K+, I’ve followed the wiki guides for naming and putting in separate folers etc. which has all been done.

Is there a way to stack collections of movies in a folder and that folder appear in the listings.

Eg: I have 10 of the Star Wars movies but would like them to appear as a folder within the listings rather than all 10 separate entries, is there a way to do this and drill down into the collection and then be presented with the idividual film entries?

11

https://kodi.wiki/view/Movie_sets

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Kodi/OSMC has a setting that can be selected to automatically place related movies into a set for you without you having to place them manually into a folder.

It is brilliant and so far has captured all my sets perfectly - Harry Potter, Fast & Furious etc.

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Many thanks for the information, very helpful.

Fingers crossed the Vero will arive tomorrow :hugs:

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Thought @nabsltd updated his avatar then…

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