A media center isn’t nearly as spectacular if your media is mislabeled or inadequately prepared. Read more to understand using Ember Media Manager to whip your media into shape and make your collection best.
Why is it that I Need a Media Manager?
Quite possibly you’ve never heard of a media manager or for those who have; you’ve written it off as something for those fanatical types to tinker with. Media managers are crucial for making sure what your media center shows is precise Cheap Alex Tuch Jersey , custom tuned, and inevitably flaunts how great your media collection is.
So what on earth is a media manager? A media manager is just software that catalogs your media and produces images and metadata to the directory the media is residing in to make certain that media center programs can access that data so as to show the correct information for your movie (ratings, reviews, cast listings Cheap Nate Schmidt Jersey , etc.) and media for your movie (box art, movie posters, fan art, etc.).
Exactly why do you want one should your media center already has built in media scraping? The majority of media centers will have some form of scraper built in-a scraper is a small script that combs through online databases just like the Internet Movie Database to find media matches. Unfortunately media scrapers range from decent to utterly crappy and correcting their mistakes using your HTPC remote control or even a media center keyboard is monotonous. Further more practically every media center stores the info it scrapes locally. Do you know what this means? If you happen to crash your media center and have to reinstall Cheap Jonathan Marchessault Jersey , all that data has to be rescraped; unless you have a good backup system (check here). Install an additional media center elsewhere inside your home? Time to rescrape again or risk at exporting and importing the data should your media center software even supports it. Scraping usually takes a long time on a big media collection. In addition to waiting for the media collection to scrape you then will need to go through and correct the errors yet again. It’s tedious and there’s no reason you must do it.
If you a media manager all that details are stored with the videos and tv shows. When you add a new media center to your home network the only thing that media center needs to do is browse the data from your media shares and insert it instead of running away all day rescraping your media.
For the following guide we’ll be using Ember Media Manager, a well known and open-source media managing tool. Ember Media Manager was originally intended for XBMC media centers nevertheless you can adjust your options to scrape data for other well-known media center apps. For this guide, however, we’ll be utilising it to set up media for XBMC.
Installing and Configuring Ember Media Manager
Setting up and configuring Ember Media Manager (EMM) is not a worry once you know the right settings to input. In the following screenshots we’ll walk you through configuring EMM to have an ideal media center experience. Keep in mind Cheap Brad Hunt Jersey , we’re setting things up for XBMC, you’ll need to tweak the settings to suit the way your media center accesses movie information, thumbnails, and fan art.
The initial thing you want to do is forget about the installation assistant tool located on the main Ember Media Manager site. It’s a small installer that checks your personal computer OS version and then downloads the most recent version available for you. It’s been broken for quite a while (as official development on Ember Media Manager is suspended). Alternatively pay a visit to the Ember Media Manager download directory at SourceForge and get the best release from the current release (1.2 right now).
After you have the right file just extract the contents wherever you would like to store Ember Media Manager Cheap William Karlsson Jersey , open up the directory, and run it the first time. No true set up necessary-you could call it portable, but since it’s so intimately linked with your media collection unless you cart it all over on your media drive it’s portable in principle only.
Language selection aside, the very first real prompt you’ll come across is usually a request for the location of your video files. Click on Add button Cheap David Perron Jersey , name your source, enter the source path, and set your source options. Scan Recursively instructs EMM to look down through folder directories and check out movies in sub-folders. Seeing that we keep all our movies inside a simple one-movie-per-folder arrangement, we kept this unchecked. Only Detect One One Movie From Each Folder is critically important for most of the thumbnail and artwork overall performance in XBMC. Should you already have all of your movies jumbled in a big folder and not just sorted into individual sub-folders we highly recommend doing a quick clean-up before going forward. Finally Use Folder Name for Initial Listing needs to be checked so EMM will make use of the folder names to pull the movie names ahead of the initial scraping.
Take note: We highly Cheap Luca Sbisa Jersey , strongly, amorously suggest you copy a few of your movie directories to be a test. We selected a few movies from my collection and set them specifically in a folder marked EMM Test. This way you could get accustomed to EMM without taking a chance on making sweeping and hard to fix changes on your entire media collection. After you feel at ease with EMM then you can switch the original source back to your main media folder. Once you’ve setup a test folder for the movies do the same to your TV shows.