Getting better Movie and TV Show indexing results with Boxee

Boxee is a cross-platform freeware media centre application based on the XBMC framework, as previously mentioned on Geekology.

By looking at media filenames Boxee tries to determine their title, season and episode, then references them against Internet databases such as imdb.com or thetvdb.com to retrieve extended information such as directors, writers, cast, artwork, plot outline, etc.

When Boxee fails to recognize a file’s metadata, you might experience several problems:

• Media won’t be listed in Boxee’s library
• Media will be incorrectly categorized
• Media will be associated with incorrect metadata (title, artwork, etc.)

To alleviate these problems you can use certain naming conventions to make your media files easier to recognize:

Movies:

Movie_Title_(Year).extension

TV Shows:

TV_Show_Title.S##E##_-_Name.extension

TV Shows containing multiple episodes:

TV_Show_Title.S##E##-##_-_Name.extension

“Movie_Title” or “TV_Show_Title” is the name of the Movie or TV Show with underscores (“_”) instead of spaces. It’s been reported that periods or spaces do work, but I’ve had best results with underscores.

“extension” is the regular file extension (such as “avi”, “mkv”, “m4v”, “mp4″, “mpeg”, “divx”).

“Year” is the four-digit year (wrapped in opening and closing brackets) that the movie was released in. If no year is specified, Boxee might find a different movie with the same name.

“S##E##” or “S##E##-##” is the season and episode numbers for the TV Show.

“_-_Name” is the name of the TV Show episode. This is optional and isn’t used by Boxee to retrieve metadata, but I like adding the names to easily find episodes when browsing files manually.

Movie examples:

Death_Note_-_1_-_Desu_Noto.avi
Death_Note_-_2_-_The_Last_Name.avi
Death_Note_-_3_-_Change_the_World.avi

TV Show examples:

Doctor_Who.S01E01_-_Rose.avi
Doctor_Who.S01E02_-_The_End_Of_The_World.avi
Doctor_Who.S01E03_-_The_Unquiet_Dead.avi
Doctor_Who.S01E04_-_Aliens_Of_London.avi
Doctor_Who.S01E05_-_World_War_Three.avi
Doctor_Who.S01E06_-_Dalek.avi

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3. Pairing or unpairing Apple remotes with AppleTVs or Macs
4. Remove hidden .svn directories with a simple Unix command
5. MacHeads: The Movie