How To Organise All Your Movies And Tv Shows – Media Companion

Sorry the blog has been a little quiet, I am away in Barcelona for a few days.. But that doesn’t mean I cant still blog, right?

Media Companion – Organize you TV Life!

I wanted to share with everyone how it is I go about keeping my TV Shows and Movies organized.See, if you like to have all of your shows on your PCs and stream them to something like Xbox Media Center or something similar, then you understand that it can be a real pain trying to organize them all and stay on track with them. But there are plenty of tools out there and I use three in total to accomplish this. This post is going to discuss the first one: Media Companion First of all, don’t allow the website appearance put you off. There is nothing wrong with it, but its not really inspiring. At least, not when compared to how well this free piece of software is put together. Billy makes the software in his spare time – which he seems to have a lot of, because he is always working hard on it.. . And although Billy wrote this to support XBMC Media Centers, I found it useful on a few different types of media centers.

Sort Out Your Movies

It handles movies beautifully. All you have to do is point it at which folder(s) contain your movies. Provided that you movies have at least part of the main title in it, then Media Companion goes to several different movie database websites such as IMDB and “scrapes” the movie name, year, plot, story, actor list and DVD cover with actors and fanart. All you have to do is hit Search For New Movies and it update your movie database. It adds all of this information locally.. as in, it stores the information on your PC. This is great because its always available. It stores it inside the movies folder and writes a .NFO file. Your media center will then read the .NFO file and display your movie details. It allows you to manually edit any movie detail including the DVD covers and fanart type. And it scrapes the trailer URL when available.

Sort Out Your TV Shows

It handles things in a similar way here, so I wont go in to too much detail. Instead, the TV Shows element scrapes its info from TVDB. It gets you the show name, show images, season image and episode screenshot along with the details for each and every episode. Again, click search for new TV Shows and it runs through and checks your folders again. This element also writes all the information in .NFO files which are compatible with your media center. Again, its outside the scope of this article to explain how your media center will gather this, but I promise to give you a full breakdown.

How To Organize Your Folders

For me, I use a Windows Home Server. I will be writing my review of Windows Home Server soon, so look out for it. I have a network folder called Videos. Inside there, I have Movies, TV Shows and Music Videos. Inside Movies I list each movie in its own folder… E.g Movies -> Casino Royale, Casper, Disturbia, In TV Shows, its goes life this: Videos -> TV Shows -> 24 -> Season 01 -> Episode list (S01E01 – NAMEOFEPISODE) The in Media Companion go to preferences and add your folders. Then let Media Companion take over whilst you enjoy a nice cold Guinness for all your hard work.

Naming, Re-Naming and Re-Re-Naming

Now you are probably thinking… I don’t have time to do all that naming!!! You’re right… and I didn’t either. I said at the beginning that I more than one piece of software to accomplish this. This is where TV Rename comes in. That will be the next blog post. Hope you enjoyed this article. Please show it by spreading the word!!!! UPDATE – I have finished the TV Rename article. Head over here for a look.

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