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FAQ

From Moving Pictures

Collected here are answers to commonly asked questions and general tips on how to complete tasks that are sometimes not immediately obvious.

Contents 1 Usability Questions 1.1 How can I add a custom movie? 1.2 How do I add a Custom Category to the Movies Menu? 1.3 How do I bring back ignored files? 1.4 Why wont this TV-Series load? 1.5 Why aren't my ISOs loading? 1.6 What about multi-seat support? 2 Technical Questions 2.1 How do I generate useful log files? 2.2 Where are the log files stored? 2.3 Why not use SQL Server Express?

Usability Questions

How can I add a custom movie?

It is fairly common for people to want to add home videos or movies that are just so rare that they are not listed in any online databases. In these cases you can manually add the movie to your database, bypassing the matching process.

1. Launch the Moving Pictures Configuration Screen.
2. Copy your custom movie to a watch folder that Moving Pictures is monitoring.
3. When the movie shows up in the Media Importer, select the movie and click the Manually Assign button (highlighted in the image to the right).
4. Fill out the pop-up form giving basic information about your movie.
5. Goto the Movie Manager tab to fill in the remaining details for the movie.

How do I add a Custom Category to the Movies Menu?

...

How do I bring back ignored files?

Currently it is only possible to unignore all previously ignored files in bulk. Because of this it is important to take care when ignoring files.

To unignore previous ignored files:

1. Launch the Moving Pictures Configuration Screen, and goto the Movie_Importer tab.
2. Click the Advanced Actions toolbar button (highlighted in the image to the right).
3. Click "Unignore All Files".

Why wont this TV-Series load?

Moving Pictures is designed to work specifically with movies, so with many data sources, TV Shows are intentionally excluded from the search results. With the IMDb data source though, if you use a custom search string and enter the IMDb ID, it will pull the TV show anyways.

Why aren't my ISOs loading?

Make sure you have included the file extension .iso (or any other CD/DVD-image file extension) in the movies extensions list in MediaPortal itself. More information can be found on the MediaPortal wiki.

What about multi-seat support?

So you want to run Moving Pictures on multiple systems, all synchronized? A movie gets added and it shows up everywhere, a movie gets watched and the watched flag gets set everywhere. Well there is no official way to do this at this point, but if you are feeling adventurous, there is a hack that you could do to get these features working while waiting for official support from the plug-in. There is a guide available over on the MediaPortal wiki.

Using this method can cause unexpected results and possibly corrupt your database, so you should backup often if you do this. It is also not officially supported by the development team, so please do not post bugs that are cropping up due to this type of setup.

Technical Questions

How do I generate useful log files?

When reporting a bug it is important to also provide useful log files. This means ensuring that the log file was created while reproducing the error you are reporting, and ensuring MediaPortal is logging at the debug level.

Moving Pictures honors the logging level of Mediaportal itself and by default the log level is not set to debug, so to create useful log files you need to change this setting:

1. Open the MediaPortal configuration screen.
2. Click on the "General" list item.
3. On the panel that's visible you can change the "Log Verbosity" using a dropdown selection box at the bottom of the screen (see the screenshot to the right).

If you are debugging the import scripts, you will want to enable debugging mode for the scripts as well. Please note that the following steps are not necessary if the issue you are reporting is not related to a scraper script.

1. Open the MediaPortal configuration screen.
2. Click on the "Plugins" list item.
3. Click on Moving Pictures, and then click on the Config button.
4. On the About tab, click the Advanced Settings button.
5. Find the setting called "Data Source Manager Enhanced Debug Mode" and set it to True.

When submitting logs, please be sure to submit both the movingpictures.log file and the MediaPortal.log file. Both are in most cases essential in identifying and tracking down a bug.

Where are the log files stored?

OS	Path
XP	C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\log\movingpictures.log
Vista / 7	C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\log\movingpictures.log

Or under the start menu, go to
Team Media Portal\Media Portal\User Files
The log files will be found in the folder called log. Usually it's best to provide movingpictures.log, mediaportal.log, and error.log (if it exists).

Why not use SQL Server Express?

The short answer is that moving to SQL Server really doesn't solve any problems, and would only complicated the user experience.

The biggest reason for requests for SQL Server support is so that users can have multiple installs of Moving Pictures all linked to the same database and the same media files. It is true that SQL Server handles concurrent transactions (several computers accessing the same database at the same time) very well. But for a small number of clients (3-5 computers), SQLite does nearly as good of a job. Sure things might be a tiny bit slower but we are talking fractions of a second. This is not a gain that justifies the increased complexity of the application itself and the increased complexity of a user installation. To properly implement a multi-seat setup (a feature we plan to implement in the future) changes need to be made to Moving Pictures itself, but the database engine that we use has very little relevance to how things are implemented.