A media center isn't nearly as amazing if your media is mislabeled or terribly prepared. Read on to discover the way you use Ember Media Manager to whip your media into shape and make your collection fantastic. So why do I want a Media Manager? Potentially you've never read about a media manager or should you have; you've written it off as something for all those compulsive types to mess with. Media managers are crucial for being sure that what your media center shows is accurate, custom tuned, and in the end flaunts how wonderful your media collection is. Exactly what is a media manager? A media manager is just an application that catalogs your media and produces images and metadata to the directory the media is stored in to ensure that media center apps can access that data so that they can show the proper information for your movie (ratings, reviews, cast listings, etc.) and media for your movie (box art, movie posters, fan art, etc.). Why would you want one in the event your media center already has built in media scraping? Almost all media centers will have some kind of scraper built in-a scraper is actually a small script that combs through online databases such as the Internet Movie Database to search for media matches. Unfortunately media scrapers range from decent to totally crappy and correcting their mistakes with your HTPC remote or even a media center keyboard is monotonous. Further more practically every media center stores the info it scrapes locally. You know what this means? If you crash your media center and have to re-install, all of that data needs to be rescraped; unless you have a good backup system (check here). Add another media center elsewhere in the house? Time to rescrape again or gamble at exporting and importing the info if your media center software even supports this. Scraping usually takes several hours on a substantial media collection. Together with waiting for the media collection to scrape you then need to go through and correct the errors once again. It's boring and there's no reason you should do it. If you a media manager all of that data is stored with the videos and tv shows. When you add a new media center to your home network the only thing that media center must do is browse the data from your media shares and load it rather than running away for hours rescraping your media. For the following tutorial we'll be using Ember Media Manager, a popular and open-source media management tool. Ember Media Manager was originally designed for XBMC media centers however you can alter your configuration settings to scrape data for other popular media center programs. In this tutorial, however, we'll be using it to alter media for XBMC. Installing and Configuring Ember Media Manager Installing and configuring Ember Media Manager (EMM) is easy once you know the best settings to key in. In the following screenshots we'll walk you through configuring EMM to have an ideal media center experience. Keep in mind, we're setting things up for XBMC, you'll have to tweak the settings to suit how your media center accesses movie information, thumbnails, and fan art. The initial thing you should do is forget about the installation assistant tool found on the main Ember Media Manager website. It's a small installer that checks your pc OS version then downloads the most up-to-date version for you. It's been busted for a while (as official progress on Ember Media Manager is halted). Alternatively visit the Ember Media Manager download directory at SourceForge and get the suitable release from the latest release (1.2 at this moment). After you have the proper file just extract the contents wherever you intend to store Ember Media Manager, open up the directory, and run it the first time. No true set up necessary-you could call it portable, but because it's so intimately associated with your media collection unless you cart it around on your media drive it's portable in theory only. Language selection aside, the first real prompt you'll run into is usually a request for the placement of the movie files. Simply click Add button, name your source, enter in the source path, as well as set your source options. Scan Recursively instructs EMM to look down through folder directories to check out movies in sub-folders. Seeing that we keep all of our movies inside a simple one-movie-per-folder configuration, we kept this unchecked. Only Detect One One Movie From Each Folder is crucial for almost all of the thumbnail and artwork overall performance in XBMC. In the event you already have all of your movies jumbled in a big folder rather than sorted into individual sub-folders we highly recommend performing a quick cleanup before going forward. Finally Use Folder Name for Initial Listing must be checked so EMM will use the folder names to get the movie names ahead of the initial scraping. Take note: We highly, strongly, passionately advocate you copy a couple of your movie directories as a test. We selected a number of movies from our collection and put them specifically in a folder labeled /EMM Test/. By doing this you may get familiar with EMM without risking making sweeping and difficult to repair changes to the entire media collection. When you finally feel at ease with EMM then you can switch the source back to your main media folder. Once you've setup the test folder for the movies perform the same on your Television shows. Once you've set your movie source EMM will prompt you to pick the way it should save posters, fan art, and NFO files. If you're setting things up for XBMC you'll choose to check folder.jpg, movie.tbn, poster.jpg, fanart.jpg, -fanart.jpg, and .nfo. Many of these, for instance folder.jpg and .tbn are semi-redundant nonetheless they serve a purpose. Folder.jpg will put a thumbnail that both XBMC's file browser and also other file browsers like Windows Explorer will recognize and .tbn is the default structure for movie cover thumbnails inside XBMC. Putting both of them in makes browsing on many programs easier and lowers loading time in XBMC. NFO files are simple text files that store media metadata. Ember Media Manager will create information in each movie folder that has all of the scraped movie info. By doing this, later on, XBMC will not ever go looking for it. It's going to pull your customized data from the film directory. Magic! Once you setup the movie folder you are going to repeat this process for Tv programs. Skip this if you have no Shows. If you do, pay attention to our prior warning! Make a test folder! You'll choose the source in the same fashion and check these options from the configuration settings menu: For this round you'll check folder.jgp, fanart.jpg, season-all.tbn, .tbn, then within the seasons section seasonXX.tbn, folder.jpg, and fanart.jpg. When you're finished picking your sources, click Next to finish and launch Ember Media Manager. You'll see the full user interface (which, for a moment will probably be empty). Straight down in the lower left corner you'll see movie and Television show titles whirling by as EMM reads your folders. The first scan isn't a scrape. It's just EMM getting the file names and pulling up any clues it finds in the folder. We had 17 movies, for example, inside our test folder and based on what was saved in the folders in addition to the movie file itself EMM pulled up info which range from just the title to fan art, ratings and more. This is entirely dependent on whether or not you've scraped the files before with another media manager or if the files you obtained already had the extras attached. Don't be surprised if there's no media information what so ever. For a virgin collection or possibly a collection you hand-ripped that's probably how you'll find it. Don't fret though! At the end of this tutorial you'll have totally updated and shining media collection. Scraping Your Media Collection with Ember Media Manager At this point you have the application set up, you've completed an initial scan, and then you have to start filling out the additional information pertaining to your media files. Let's begin by using The Nightmare Before Christmas as an example. It's sitting in EMM but it has absolutely no data; it's only a raw movie file. That's not very interesting and it gives our media center practically nothing interesting to load up. Let's execute a single scrape of this individual movie to show you how the process works. You won't have to individually scrape every movie, mind you! Ember Media Manager does a fantastic job bulk scraping. If you're fresh to this business of media organization and scraping, however, we'd like you to view the process in step-by-step action. Select a movie and right click it, we'll be utilizing The Nightmare Before Christmas, and choose (Re)Scrape Movie. For pretty much every movie, save for an odd foreign film or barely-known indie film, EMM should quickly kick back a result. It found The Nightmare Before Christmas in just seconds. Simply select the match and click OK. EMM will scrape for another moment after which it provide you with a presentation of movie posters. Some movies simply have just one poster, some have many. Pull down the largest image you are able to, who knows how high-resolution the media centers and HDTVs of tomorrow will be-it's a bit of future-proofing. As soon as the movie poster selection comes the fan art. "Fan art" so to speak, can vary in anything from movie photos from popular scenes, promotional wallpaper released by the studio, custom made images created by fans, and also completely unique fan-generated art. Most movies have a good number of images from which to choose. In case you can't decide EMM has a caching feature built in. In the event you check off a few fan art only the one you choose in blue will be the primary fan art, each of the others will be locally cached together with the movie in the /extrathumbs/ category for quick future access. When you're done deciding on movie posters and fan art, Ember Movie Manager will kick you to the Edit Movie dashboard for the movie you're concentrating on. There you can review all the new changes it has made including things like the cast list, plot summary, rating, genre tagging, and the poster/fan art/extra thumbs you've acquired. If all looks good just click OK in the corner. What was an empty gray box that simply said "No Information is Available for This Movie" is now a colorful movie summary which includes a movie poster, fan art, ratings (both critical ratings and parental warning ratings) along with icons indicating the resolution and sound quality of your video. Like what you see? Take the time to right click on the movie you recently scraped and choose Lock. That is a completely new function in Ember Media Manager that permits you to lock an entry you're satisfied with to make sure that future scraping won't accidently replace your hand picked artwork. Entries for locked items contain a mild blue background. The very first movie scrape went so perfectly, let's scrape everything! Ember Media Manager should make it very simple to scrape your entire collection. Click the Scrape Media icon located on the menu bar to the right of your Movies tab. A pull down menu will show up. Here in the menu you may pick what media you wish to scrape. Since we have a new collection with (save for the movie we scraped!) no movie data, we're about to scrape all of the movies, require EMM to prompt us if it's puzzled on a movie match, and to download all items. Usually EMM does a great job identifying which movie is which, but it sometimes has a problem like whether or not the Transformers movie in question may be the 1984 version or maybe the 2007 variant. There is one downside to mass scraping. EMM just picks the most used movie covers and fan art for you. If you're a customization nut you'll want to manually scrape each video. We love to to strike a bargain; we allow EMM do the bulk scrape, then we run through the listings and see if there are actually any covers or movie posters that we'd like to change. In general the default picks are OK with us and allowing for EMM to perform the heavy-lifting saves a lot of time. When you're done with movies, it's time to do your TV shows. TV shows are done almost identically with just a few minimal differences-the process is so identical we're gonna skip with the step-by-step screenshots and just give you a rundown of the differences. The TV Shows tab is located next to the Movies tab in the main interface. You just click on it and browse your TV show listings. The big difference between the films and TV Shows interface is that you can't mass scrape your Television shows. There are a few additional steps involved in the process for Television shows such as choosing the language the show is in, snatching season pictures, then of course the season/episode scraping. As a result you'll need to right click and (Re)scrape each TV show. You may highlight multiple shows after which choose (re)scrape to scrape them, but you'll be prompted when it's completed each show to make choices for the following show from the list. Scraping for any big show with various seasons and hundreds of episodes could take a couple of minutes-Buffy the Vampire Slayer took a good Ten mins worth of scraping, as an example. Compared with movies where EMM is required to scrape not many images, TV show scraping involves snatching multiple seasons in cover and fan art, episode summaries, episode screen grabs, and further information. Thankfully because you're scraping the data and putting it with your media, you only have to do it once! Just like with the movies when you scrape a Television show and you're really happy with the end result don't forget to right click and lock the entry so it doesn't mistakenly get rescraped in the future. If your test of Ember Media Manager's movie and Tv series scraping abilities went well, go on and copy over all the folders from the test directory back to their respective media directories. Then go in to the menu bar and click Edit -> Settings and the Files and Sources section under both Movies and Television shows, modify the source location from the test directory to your main directory. It's an extra step or two we know, but it's far better to learn the ropes by using a powerful tool like EMM in a test directory than to make a mess of your existing media directory. Once you've adjusted the source directories you can scan your media collection to have everything up to date and revel in your gloriously ordered collection! Viewing Updated Media in XBMC All of that work isn't really worth much if you can't appreciate it on the TV. Go turn on XBMC and update your library. XBMC should rescan your whole directories and make use of the locally cached data as it looks for local info before sending the scraper out onto the internet to fill in the gaps. Because of your handy work there shouldn't be any gaps to complete.
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Ember Media Manager is undoubtedly a terrific media manager for Personal computer's that will make it possible for anyone to scrape your current assortment of videos as well as shows for you to obtain all of the proper meta-data.
Richard Jacoby is trained in in media organization using Ember Media Manager to assure his HTPC has clean, solid metadata for his home theater pc applications. He is revered as being a HTPC expert.
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