Are there any particular guidelines or tips relating to organising and naming media files specifically for the Z9X? I've found several very comprehensive online guides for Kodi and other systems but none which make reference to the Zidoo boxes; does that mean that the basic rules on directory structure and filenames and the like are universal? Many thanks.
After a pleasant (and occasionally frustrating) afternoon of experimenting I think I can begin to answer my own question: my media files are presently arranged and named in rather a haphazard manner (though in broadly the recommended Movies/TV/Music and so on main directories) and I was delighted to find that the Z9X coped brilliantly, correctly identifying the vast majority of them, especially in the Cinema area. Obviously it would be better and neater to have everything uniformly labelled and properly organised and I'll work towards that, but for now I'm very pleased with the results of an initial scan.
HT doesn't really care how you organise your files but for sanity it's best to keep things tidy. As for movie names, simply the name as listed in TMDB is the best route. If there is an illegal character (eg Mission: Impossible) just leave that character out (Mission Impossible). For TV shows use SeriesName - S**E** is the best option - if you put episode names in this can confuse the scraper. (others will give better advice than me on the vagaries of TV shows as I don't use them). If it's a muxed file, eg MKV, MP4 etc, then have the folder and file named the same and for ISOs or BDMV structures, obviously just the folder name.
Yes, that clearly makes sense. And many thanks for the other tips which are much appreciated. One thing is slightly puzzling me: there are a number of avi files which generate the message "cannot play video": I'll investigate further to see if they have anything in common.
Any tips for movies with numbers in the titles. That seems to be the bulk of movies that weren't matched in my library. Is there a way I can put them in their own folder with a text file that identifies exactly what movie it is?
Check them and see if any have "packed bitstream" if so unpack them with MPEG4Modifier if that doesn't solve the problem then re encode as AVC and to mkv container using AVIdemux or similar.
Thank you. I'll try that this weekend. Any tips for naming 8 1/2 by Federico Fellini. It's giving me a major headache. I can't even search and find it on TMDB for some odd reason. Thanks in advance.
It won't match automatically because you can't use "/ " in a filename, also HT doesn't particularly like numbers. So match it to anything then rematch and enter "8 1/2" as the search, hit the TMDB button, scroll down and select the right movie:
Thank you. I was able to match it the other night before read your response. I just used the "½" instead of 1/2. I didn't even realize that windows would accept "½" in a file name. I guess I learn something new every day. I have successfully matched all the TV and Movies now in my collection. Over 2000 titles. Something like 6000+ files. Now I'm going through my Blu-Ray collection and re-ripping everything so I can replace all my SD movies. Thanks for all the advice.
I wish Zidoo would automatically create a collection if the movies were into a folder. For e.g. all my Marvel movies are in a "Marvel" folder. There could be sub-collections (Avengers / IronMan / Thor etc) within the main collection. It makes for a natural navigation order. Not sure if others would like it too this way.
