PVD and MediaPortal MovingPictures

[Nautilus2067]

This is going to be a little guide for people using the MediaPortal extension Moving Pictures.

Inventory

• Introduction
• Prerequisites
• Export from Moving Pictures
• Import to PVD
• Export from PVD
• Import to Moving Pictures
• Conclusion

Introduction
Using MediaPortal on my HTPC I liked the extension Moving Pictures for the beginning. Building the movie database I followed Lehmden’s manual (german only). Now I have a nice collection of movies easy accessible. But I wanted to have the possibility to create lists, do mass updates, have informations about the actors and so on. So I decided to move to PVD as primary tool. What I needed was the means to get the data out of Moving Pictures into PVD and back into Moving Pictures again. I the next chapters I describe how this can be accomplished.

Prerequisites

• The movies must be stored in a separate folder for each movie. If this is not the case, there are several tools to do this. Some are the freeware tools file2foldergui and Peter's Flexible Renaming Kit (PFrank). Nostra is working on a solution so that PVD will be able to manage this itself in future. For this topic read also Organize files / How to move videos to separate folders
• Posters and screenshots for each movie have to be stored in the movie folder. They can be in subfolders though.

Export from Moving Pictures
There is a tool called MovPicNFO that creates XBMC like XML files with the same name as the movie filename and the extension .nfo in the movie folder. This file follows XBMC definition but is not exactly the XBMC format.  MovPicNFO can also export posters and backdrops (screenshots) as well as the watched status. But remember that Moving Pictures has only one poster and one backdrop so it is better if all images are already in the movie folder like stated in the prerequisites.

Import to PVD
To import the movie data proceed as followed:

• Use PVD function “scan folders for new movies/changed paths…” to import the movies and read the technical data. All images will automatically be imported as posters. Nostra is working on a solution to prevent the automatic import of pictures (see How to load movies without pictures). As a workaround delete all posters and screenshots. The newly imported movies are all selected so just execute the appropriate functions in PVD.
• To import the movie metadata I have written a little script (see Import from XBMC/MovPicNFO .nfo XML-File).
• Importing posters, screenshots (aka backdrops) is done with a separate script (see Import Script for locally saved images).
• As a last step the watched status is imported via a little script (see Import Script for viewed field from local file WatchStatus.xml).

Export from PVD

• Export movie metadata via template (see Export Template: MovingPictures .nfo XML file). If you have added pictures in PVD that are not present in the movie folder, they can be exported with the corresponding template that exports also the pictures.
• Export watched status via template (see Export Template: watched status as XML file).

Import to Moving Pictures
To import the movie metadata in Moving Pictures, the XBMC scraper has to be used as described in Lehmden’s manual. The watched status can be imported using MovPicNFO.

Conclusion
Thanks to the powerful customization features of PVD I have created a solution to seamlessly integrate PVD in my existing home theater landscape with the method I described above. PVD is now my primary tool to manage my movie collection. The interface to my media portal is realized via local files. They serve as a database independent backup as well. As the pictures are saved locally too, I do not have to import them in PVD which keeps my PVD database small.
The mentioned scripts and templates may have to be adapted to your situation as I have used some user defined fields.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

Oliver

[Dadeo]

I'm curious why go through all that when you can export Personal Video Database to XML and import it directly into MyFilms plugin for MediaPortal? You don't even need to move your movies to separate folders. It only takes a few minutes to create a database using the Setup Wizard and you can be using your PVD catalog in MediaPortal.

MyFilms offers so many more features than MovingPictures, such as view, sort by any field, search for related films with the same actors or crew members. And it supports PVD actors, crew and images.

Better yet, you can export your DVD/BD movies which is not possible using MovPicNFO without a lot of work to create dummy folders.

With PVD's great Export Template system you can probably easily export fields like Audio Codec, Bitrates and Languages which PVD (at least in the past) did not export by default.

[Nautilus2067]

I am planning to migrate to myFilms. But I started with MovingPictures and had to get the data from MovingPictures to import in PVD. So I developed this solution. PVD is the leading system now. Having the all data stored locally in folders together with the movies has the advantage of having the data available independent of any database. By the way, I am still using MovingPictures as I haven't found the time to implement myFilms because of business matters.