Z10 Home Theater - .nfo, movie-poster, thumbs and artwork - structure and location of data

I have a few questions and I hope somebody can shed a bit of light on the matters below:

1) Is there documentation for how a scan&match of movies and posters, thumbs and artwork is performed?

2) I understand that the HT looks for the .nfo file in the movie folder and if found, the .nfo file is parsed for content location (poster, artwork, etc) and loads the pictures from the locations indicated in the .nfo file. Is my understanding correct? If yes, how (is)must the content of the .nfo file be organized? Is there any documentation for the structure and data fields of such a .nfo file?

3) If we want to download our own posters and artwork, how should those picture-files be named and where should they be located in the movie folder? Before doing a re-scan/match?

4) On other media players, if a folder (and recursively any sub-folders of that parent folder) contains a file called "folder.jpg" that file is presented on the wall as the folder thumb. If the folder contains media files (say "Godfather.mkv") and there is a matching picture called Godfather.jpg .. that Godfather.jpg is shown as the movie thumb. Does HT have the same functionality?

5) Does anyone know where the database containing the information about matching a movie in a folder with the corresponding thumb and artwork reside? How the database is structured? Can that database/repository be tweaked manually by the end user?

 

I'd be interested in this as well as I have one movie (concert video) that HT 2.0 can't find and need a way to manually enter it. (It is not on IMDB either).

 

Bumping this up, I have been searching and scouring the forums and web for "something" that covers the folder structure naming and how to name the artwork, from what i can tell from the vague information I have found they aren't like the plex/kodi/emby naming convention. None of this is easy to find and covers it in detail.

It would be really nice to have a sticky that is easy to find that covers this in detail, it's pretty important for newbies.

But I need to know what I need to name posters and backdrops...is it just poster.jpg and backdrop.jpg?

 

Have a look at the PDF attached here:

http://forum.zidoo.tv/index.php?thr...619-players-naming-file-updated-jan-22.82695/

 

Thank you! That helps a lot! Saving those pdfs now for future reference

On the filename, I noticed in a lot of the posts the (year) is missing from the file names...for example in the PDF it says Back to the Future.mkv. Can I add the year to my file names and not affect anything? For example can it be Back to the Future (1985).mkv instead? How about the artwork? Can it be Back to the Future (1985)-poster.jpg?

Also will HT 4.0 ignore anything in the folder name and file name with brackets [ ] ? Would I be able to include the video size [1080p] or [2160p] in the file name and not hurt anything? For example Back to the Future (1985) [1080p].mkv

I'm just trying to cover all of my bases, the year and video size is just for me to be able to distiguish real fast what movie it is since there are several different movies with the same name and what movie file it is (DVD, BD or UHD). I have a lot of titles with mutiple names,

Lastly, I am using Tiny Media Manager, I went ahead and got a paid subscription...which nfo downloader works best with HT 4.0? I have several options (Emby, Kodi, etc) in there to generate with.

Thanks again for your help

 

You can add the year but I prefer not to unless there will be ambiguity without it - for example Ghostbusters.mkv and Ghostbusters (2016).mkv. And yes, the "-poster", "-fanart" must always match the filename, so if it's Ghostbusters (2016).mkv it has to be Ghostbuster (2016)-poster.mkv.

Brackets do not act as delimiters but can be used and yes, you should be fine adding the resolution but the absolute key to the best matching is to get the filename exactly the same as the TMDB entry. There are instances where this is impossible - eg. Mission: Impossible because a colon is not a valid filename character. In that case I tend to use dashes but probably the best option is simply to omit the character - so you use Mission Impossible.mkv.