Setting Up for Media Center Part #2 More on Metadata

Okay – so I got the tv shows’ metadata updated with Media Center Master, and have now started work on the movies.  The time consuming part is getting the folders structured correctly so the metadata can be saved properly.  It makes sense to me to do it this way, but its a little painful.  For anyone else stumbling across this article, the folder structures basically need to be:

TV Shows:

X:\My TV Shows\TV Show X\Season 01\xxxx.avi

Movies:

X:\My Movies\Movie X\xxxxx.avi

Where X: is the drive letter (not important for this exercise).  My TV Shows / My Movies are the folders that contain all of your collection. Each TV show needs to have a folder for each season, even if it only has one season.  Just a quirk of how it all works.  For the few shows that go over 10 seasons, its easier to just get in the habit of making all the season numbers prefixed by zero if its less than ten.  Ie. Season 01 instead of Season 1.  Both do work though. The xxxx.avi is the actualy video file.  If its a movie, it should be the title, and preferrably the year (ie. MyMovie (2010).avi).  If its a TV show then it should be Season + Episode codes.  To hard to describe, but obvious once you see it.  Ie. S01E01 – MyMovie Premier.avi).  Dont worry too much about anything after the SxxExx part as Media Center Master can fix up the filenames as long as it know which one its looking at.

I found this brief guide on getting metadata set up if anyone needs more info. Another guide here for using Media Center Master.

Setting Up for Media Center Part #1 The Metadata

After visting a mate and seeing how well he set up Media Center with metadata, I decided to look into it myself.

The process is to basically get an application to look through your TV / Movie folders and grab all the pertinent information about the show, the actors, ratings, description of episodes, artwork (poster etc), and so on.  Once the application has set up your folders with the extra info (metadata) then Media Center can look at it and display it nicely for you.

There is a popular tool to do this called MetaBrowser, which now requires registration and a fee to use.  The old version works, but is far from user friendly.  But, in looking around to find instructions on setting up metabrowser, I came across Media Center Master.

So far it looks promising.   Looks like it does a decent job, and even has facility to download shows / keep them up to date via torrents.  Im yet to test out Media Center to see the final result.

If you are interested, grab version 1.25 as its completely free and unlimited.  The later versions have a free/paid option with a number of restrictions on the free one of course.

Worth a look anyway 🙂