Movie Importer
From Moving Pictures
The Movie Importer is where you will manage the importation of movies on your hard drive or on external media, into Moving Pictures. This tab consists of two main sections. The Media Sources section, which allows you to specify where movies will be pulled from, and the Media Importer section which allows you to manage the importation process.
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Overview
The Media Importer imports movies in a four step process.
- Moving Pictures scans your watch folders for valid video files, automatically grouping together files that appear to be separate parts of the same movie. It then adds these files to the file list.
- Moving Pictures retrieves a list of possible movies for each file or file-set.
- If Moving Pictures has a high degree of confidence that a correct match has been found, it will automatically approve the match. Otherwise it will wait for the user to approve a match.
- Moving Pictures retrieves details and artwork for the approved movie/file match and writes this information to the database and the hard drive.
The Approval Process
Ideally you should never have to approve a movie to be paired with a file and Moving Pictures will automatically pull results for your entire collection. Occassionally though, Moving Pictures may not be confident in a movie/file match or it may have a hard time finding results. In these cases you will need to manually approve a movies to be linked to a file or set of files.
The current status of a movie in the importer is indicated by a status icon, displayed before each file or file-set in the file list. Movies that Moving Pictures has not yet begun to process bear no status icon.
Once Moving Pictures begins to scan for possible movies to match against a file, the "processing" status icon 
is displayed. This is a visual indicator of which files Moving Pictures is currently scanning.
After Moving Pictures has scanned for possible matches, the correct movie for a file needs to be approved before Moving Pictures will retrieve details and artwork. If Moving Pictures feels it has found a movie that is very likely correct, it will automatically approve the match and apply the "approved" status icon 
.
Manually Approve a Movie
If Moving Pictures is not sure which movie a file represents, it will wait for approval from the user and the "input required" status icon 
is applied. No files marked with this status icon will be imported until you select and approve a movie for the file. You can approve a movie by selecting it in the corresponding drop down list or clicking the green check mark on the toolbar (approving the currently displayed movie in the drop down).
Once a movie has been approved, either by the user or by Moving Pictures automatic approval logic, movie details and artwork will then be retrieved for the movie. Once this process is complete, the "completed" status icon 
will be applied to the file in the file list. At this point the movie has been full imported and will be available in the MediaPortal GUI.
Finding More Search Results
Occasionally Moving Pictures just doesn't find the movie you're looking for. Usually a quick check of the dropdown list is enough, but on the rare occassion that the correct movie is not listed there, you should try manually searching for matches. Simply click the search button (highlighted in the image to the right) and type in the name of the movie in the dialog box. You also optionally can enter the year or IMDb ID for better results.
Grouping and Splitting Multi-Part Movies
Moving Pictures will automatically group multiple files that are seperate parts of the same movie. If Moving Pictures incorrectly groups a set of files, or does not group several files that should be grouped together, you can perform grouping and splitting manually.
To group several files together to be treated as a single movie, highlight the files that should be grouped in the file list and click the split/merge button (depicted in the screenshot to the right).
To split a set of grouped files, simply select the file in the importer and click the split/merge button on the toolbar. The split/merge button graphic will change based on the context to indicate which option is available based on the current selection.
Manually Adding 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.
To manually add a movie to Moving Pictures, click the "Manually Add" button, highlighted in the image to the right. In the following popup, fill in basic information about your movie, and it will then be immediately added to Moving Pictures. You can then later modify further details about the movie in the Movie Manager tab.
Ignoring Files
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