So, i have Kodi and everything set for video playing. But i have one issue.
I connected my USB drive that i have my movies saved on to my laptop to set up everything right.
I created two folders on the main drive, a folder name MOVIES, where i have named each sub-folder after the movie title Home Alone (1990)
Inside of the sub-folder is the movie file name Home Alone (1990).mp4 and also along with the movie cover Home Alone (1990)-poster.jpg
The second folder on the main USB drive is the Movie set information folder inside of the MSIF folder are sub-folders. USB drive still connected to laptop, so do i put anything manually in the MSIF sub-folders
You can manually put artwork for the movie sets in that folder if you want something different than what the scraper is going to pick for you. That folder has to be set in Kodi’s settings for it to be picked up though. That is kinda sucky manual labor though. It would be easier to just change the artwork in Kodi and then if you want to preserve this information for a possible future reinstall or for a second Kodi instance that shares the data locations just export the library from Kodi which will build out that folder for you. Another option would be to use Tiny Media Manager and set this location in your preferences. Then when you scrape a movie set it builds out movie set info folder as well as the nfo files for the movies themselves which is where the movie set descriptions are stored.
Be aware though that Kodi stores the artwork and description when it scrapes the first movie using a movie set name. After that it will not pick up any new artwork or description unless you remove both the movie set and all movies in that set from the library and scan again.
OK, in here that i was looking at https://kodi.wiki/view/File:LocalMovieSetsArt01.jpg
It show the Movie-Set Art which is the MSIF folder is that right.
and inside of the MSIF folder are the sub-folders each one title by the movie.
So do i save the movie artwork in each MSIF sub-folder. I have on kodi all the setting right,
I have the Artwork Level set too Maximum and the Movie Set Information set to the MSIF for located on the USB drive.
I read here https://kodi.wiki/view/Movie_set_information_folder
- This is the only method that Kodi will use to search and cache local movie set artwork. Movie set artwork saved in the movie folders will not be recognized.
And i read somewhere else the artwork goes in the same folder as the movie file.
It doesn’t matter what the folder is called. You just need to tell Kodi what folder your using in settings>media>video>movie set information folder>
No, inside are folders titled with the exact name of the movie set (ie Home Alone Collection), not the name of the movies. Inside of those folders should be artwork titled the same as what they would be for a movie (ie poster.jpg, fanart.jps, banner.jpg, etc.). Note that for both movies and movie sets when the artwork is in its own dedicated folder the filename of the movie does not need to be contained in the artwork naming.
Once upon a time when movie sets first showed up there was no local information scraping option. You could manually set it in Kodi or scrape from TMDB. Then there was a half-assed solution I forget the details of. Now there is the movie set information folder and that is the only local scraping option.
It is actually fairly straightforward. When you scrape a movie that is part of a collection the information about the collection comes in with it (you might have to be using TMDB scraper, i’m not sure about this though). If your using local files the nfo for the movie that is stored next to the movie will contain the name of the movie set, its overview, and optionally a url to grab the artwork online. Any artwork stored next to the movie is just for the movie. When you scrape a movie Kodi checks to see if it matches an existing movie set and if it does then it just adds it to the existing collection without changing it. If you library doesn’t already have a movie set in its library using that name then it uses the overview and artwork associated with that movie. When this happens it will look for local artwork for this movie set in [movie set information folder]/[movie set name]/[artwork type.ext].
Inside of the Movie-set art each sub-folders should have collection at the end like
One Movie Set Art sub-folder name Home Alone collection and save the artwork inside of the folder just poster.jpg right.
So let me get this straight, i like to do this manually on the computer
1 In the Movie-art folder, each folder is label like this Home Alone Collection with the movie cover inside marked poster.jpg
2 In my MOVIE folder, each folder has the movie file and movie poster.
Home Alone (1990).mp4
Home Alone (1990-poster.jpg
How is the movie folders with the MP4 and poster inside would be named
Movie/Home Alone (1990)/Home Alone (1990).mp4
Movie/Home Alone (1990)/folder.jpg
Moviesetartwork/Home Alone Collection/poster.jpg
There is some flexibility in how you name the poster art which I imagine should be outlined in Kodi’s wiki somewhere. If your having trouble wrapping your head around how local metadata works you might do yourself a favor and export a library to individual files and look at how Kodi spits them out. If you don’t want to mess around with your current library you might just install Kodi on a PC and make a library with just a few files and play with that first.
One more thing that may be worth mentioning is that Kodi will only recache a specific file path once in 24hrs. So if you swap out any artwork using the same exact name at the same exact location this change will not show up until this timer has elapsed.
So, i installed Kodi on my laptop to play around with it better on the laptop so i will hope to get it right when i bring it up on the TV.
So here my story,
from the USB on the computer that i have KODi installed on to play around with it first.
The Movie-Set art folder which contains the sub-folder name
Home Alone (1990)
and
Bon Voyage, Charlie (1980)
In my MOVIES folder with all the movies in each sub-folder name
Home Alone (1990)
and
Bon Voyage, Charlie (1980)
inside of the movie sub-folders is the file and poster
Home Alone (1990).mp4 and Home Alone (1990)–poster.jpg
and
Bon Voyage, Charlie (1980).mp4 and Bon Voyage, Charlie (1980)-poster.jpg
Here’s a brief look
I go to Pictures-movie Media source which is my usb drive -MOVIES folder- and my two movies with the cover showing up great.
Once i click on the movie cover, it goes right to the movie file, like open the DVD box.
One this, why when i select PICTURES i select on the Movie Source the USB drive and click on the MOVIES folder and it shows the Movie covers on each movie folder.
But when i go to VIDEO and to the movie, it don’t show the movie covers on each movie folder
The Pictures section of the skin your using is exchanging the folder icon for a thumbnail of a picture in that folder. The Videos section of the skin you’re using isn’t doing the same, or it might require you to actually scrape the files into a library first. This is typical as the Videos section is generally used for setup and for playing files that you haven’t scraped. You said you wanted movie sets though and they only work with a Kodi library. If you set your movies folder as a source and you assign a scraper to that source and then update the library to scrape your content in then you should see your artwork in the “Movies” section. Also by default movie sets are hidden when there is only a single movie in the library (particularly useful when a movie set name exists for a movie that doesn’t even have a sequel yet) so if you want that Home Alone Collection movie set to show up in the library you are going to have to add another of the films in the series to your test setup.
BTW you don’t even need real video files to play with this. Many a time I have just renamed a empty text document as a movie name to work out a scraping issue someone posted about.
Now that i have KODI on the computer, i was playing around with it.
For my needs, all Since i don’t keep my Pi connected to the internet uless i updated KODI every few months.
I just removed the MSIF folder from the USB drive and Just my main folder MOVIE folder with the sub-folders for each movie file and poster along with it.
All i did went back to the computer access the usb drive, the movie file stays the same
Home Alone (1990).mp4 and the poster just name poster.
So instead of naming the movie poster like Home Alone (1990)-poster.jig or poster.jig which that would be why the movies will show up in PICTURES with the Movie poster showing.
So, i started messing around with KODI on the computer and tried many things out renaming the posters.
So i just rename the poster just plain poster. No .jig just plain poster and access the video and went to my USB drive on the TV that is and went to the MOVIE source folder, and select scroll down the list of movies and my movie covers were showing.
One question.
When i do go to my movie collection, under were the poster is display, it says below No Information available
Yes, because you haven’t scraped the movie into a library and that is where the skins populate the plot from. Unlike something like an mp3 file the metadata isn’t contained within the movie file (please no comments about me ignoring mkv’s ability to do this) so it has to be gathered online or manually created. If you want this extra information on an OSMC box that isn’t connected to the internet then you need to have this information contained in nfo files and then you can, on your offline box, have the scraper set to local information only and update the library. So you could take your storage device and plug it into a PC with internet, generate all the metadata and store it on this same drive and then plug the drive back into the offline box and then update its library to pick up this metadata. To generate these local files you can either scrape everything in Kodi and then tell it to export the library as individual files, or else you can use a media manager program (such as Tiny Media Manager but there are others) which will scrape the content online and then save the local metadata files in the proper places.
