Question about WTV recordings in XBMC and BTsync

[hoorah]

So I'm building yet another HTPC out of my pile of core 2 systems to my sister who is several states away. She gets next to nothing with OTA and has Uverse so no interest in cable card tuners. Her actual requirements are actually just to play some simple games (Sims, Roller Coaster Tycoon, etc) and DVD/Netflix playback, but I'm interested in testing out some new stuff with this.

Since she's not recording anything, I think I am going to set her up with XBMC, which admittedly I don't have a lot of experience with since I've run WMC for everything myself.

Here's where I was thinking of trying something new. I've been playing around with MCEbuddy converting some of my WTV files into MP4, cutting out the commercials and leaving me with a much smaller file size. I would like to setup a BTsync folder shared between the two of us that I can drop converted media into that would then sync to her PC. I'm guessing that converting to MP4 strips all the metadata from the file, so for her to get metadata for the show in XMBC I need to rename the files into a show/season/episode format that XMBC understands, correct?

What are the best practices for doing this? (WTV -> MCEBUDDY -> file rename -> XMBC) I know you can setup MCEbuddy to rename files but not sure if the file renames jive with XBMC.

Second - has anyone tried to use BTsync for this with another XMBC system over the internet? Work/doesn't work? Things to watch out for?

 

[poofyhairguy]

I'm guessing that converting to MP4 strips all the metadata from the file, so for her to get metadata for the show in XMBC I need to rename the files into a show/season/episode format that XMBC understands, correct?

Yup. XBMC likes this convention:

TV Show Name -EXACTLY as is on www.theTVDB.com! (Folder)
--TV Show Name - S0XE0X - episode title (optional).mp4

What you would do is setup whatever folder it syncs to as a tv source as part of the setup. Then I would use a pluggin to scan that folder for content every hour or so to add those episodes to the library. This is called scraping, as it pulls down the metadata from that thetvdb.com website when the update is run. Here is the pluggin that I would use:

http://kodi.wiki/view/Add-on:XBMC_Library_Auto_Update

For her part I would use a skin that lets me customize the menu options and I would cut it down so basically she can only get into the already scraped content. That makes it super easy for her.

 

[hoorah]

Yup. XBMC likes this convention:

TV Show Name -EXACTLY as is on www.theTVDB.com! (Folder)
--TV Show Name - S0XE0X - episode title (optional).mp4

What you would do is setup whatever folder it syncs to as a tv source as part of the setup. Then I would use a pluggin to scan that folder for content every hour or so to add those episodes to the library. This is called scraping, as it pulls down the metadata from that thetvdb.com website when the update is run. Here is the pluggin that I would use:

http://kodi.wiki/view/Add-on:XBMC_Library_Auto_Update

For her part I would use a skin that lets me customize the menu options and I would cut it down so basically she can only get into the already scraped content. That makes it super easy for her.

Thanks, appreciate it. Thats the same file format that I use for when I put my shows into mediabrowser, so I will probably just link her to my mediabrowser library and let her sync off of that (or at least the shows she wants) and merge the whole thing into one operation.