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.