After being far from satisified with the information on the Metadata 101 support page I’ve spent the last day learning the ins and outs of Infuse’s detection system by messing around and would like to share my findings as it has resulted in an incredibly clean and perfectly working automatic fetching library:
TV Shows
Tip 1 - Take out certain punctuation from your TV Show's folder
eg. Key & Peele = Key and Peele
eg. Eastbound & Down = Eastbound and Down
eg. Mr. Robot = Mr Robot
eg. The Venture Bros. = The Venture Bros
eg. Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy = Seth MacFarlanes Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy
Bonus tip, if you have that particular collection as one file, put it in the folder "Season 1" (goes against Tip 2's advice) - I just figured this out while making this post
Tip 2 - Go to thetvdb.com and name your files and folders in accordance to their numbering
eg. Archer = Archer (2009)
eg. root\Curb Your Enthusiasm\Specials\Curb Your Enthusiasm - s0e01 - etc.xxx
Noteable exceptions
Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! = Tim and Eric
David Attenborough's Kingdom of Plants 3D = Kingdom of Plants
The Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy "special" needs to be in the Season 1 folder and named with "s0e01" in the filename
Tip 3 - Remove any sub-folders from within your season sub-folders
Tip 4 - Be careful with each show's episode's naming structure, keep it consistent!
Make sure the file has the show name and a Season/Episode value right after it, eg s04e01, 4x01, ep24</strong
Note: to use absolute ordering you must also name the show the same as Infuse have chosen for their name of the absolute ordered version, eg. for the Anime Samurai Champloo, sticking to s01eXX proved to be the best, but if I were to use absolute ordering I would need to use "Samurai Chanpurû EPXX"
For correct season sorting copy your favourite (if different) naming scheme across all of the show's seasons:
use the same spacing: full stops/spaces/underscores
consider the characters immediately after the season/episode portion
Movies
Tip 1 - File name!
Strip everything out of the file name except for the title, nicely spaced with a year at the end in brackets
eg. The Sound of Music[1965][720x436]AC3[6ch][Eng].xxx = The Sound of Music (1965).xxx - This caused me no end of grief and was initially picked up as a tv show due to having the resolution inside and the metadata search was stuck on TV Shows only, bad Infuse!
Doing simply this in the end actually resolved 95% of issues with movies
Tip 2 - Same as tip 3 above, delete all sub-folders. It's ok to have zips or anything in the movie's folder, but no sub folders
Tip 3 - Put alternate cuts in seperate folders and give them a unique folder.jpg file if required.The metadata for most alternate cuts/versions won't be found. I haven't investigated making custom XML files too much but it seems that for best results name the XML file the same as the movie file and use the structure on the Metadata 101 page
I hope this helps a lot of you out! It’s been annoying but incredibly rewarding finding out how janky and particular Infuse can be but when you know how to push its buttons just right, the results are certainly worth it.
I have found that the the important thing to be recognised as a film is as you say it starts with the film name and year in round brackets. However I have found that infuse appears to ignore anything after the year, so you could have changed your above example to The Sound of Music (1965) [720x436]AC3[6ch][Eng].xxx
All of my TV shows are in folders for that series and named the way TheTVdatabase names them. This causes a problem with series that have a hyphen in them such as Stargate SG-1, Hawaii Five-0. Series that have periods like Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. also are a problem maybe because windows seems to remove the end period from folder names.
I find that if i edit the metadata for one episode in that series and select the correct one it is able to then find all the other episodes and metadata for that series as long as they are in the same folder and subfolders. Much easier than renaming.
Renaming individual episode titles may work if I only used Infuse but I do use other media center programs that all do fetch metadata correctly (or has a way to correct them without renaming) since my files are named the way TheTVdatabase and TheMovieDB has them.
My go-to program is still Infuse and I love it - Keep up the great work!
I suspect the problem is more to do with the fact that Infuse uses period in the same way as space to be a word separator. In these cases do not include the period in the filename ( eg “Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD” ) and they then match automatically.
Hi, any idea on how to name DVD Folders for TV Series? I tried “Downton Abbey s01e01e02e03” and so on for the folder name holding the appropriate video_ts subfolder. Infuse recognises the TV Show correctly but I can only choose Episode 1, Episode 4 and Episode 7 from the episode menue. The Header of the Season only Shows “Downton Abbey S1 E1” but is not showing the other two episodes located on the same DVD. I expext it to Show up as “Downton Abbey S1 E1 E2 E3”. Any idea or do I just missinterprete functionalyity? Thanks and best regards
Michael
Hi Michael, unfortunately I personally do not have experience with Infuse 5. Logically you did the right thing and it’s a shame it doesn’t scrape correctly.
A completely alternative recommendation is to put the files through an encoder and convert to x.264 or even x.265 if you’ve got the horsepower. You have control over the bit rate and those compression algorithms are far superior to MPEG-2 (H.222 / H.262) - I did this with my Adult Swim DVDs…although had to go a step further since all discs were technically “1 episode” despite featuring at least 6.
My previous experience loading TV episodes onto my iPad was doing so individually. But this process yielded no cool graphics or related database info. So, based on your advice, I instead created a folder, gave it the series title (The Americans), then filled it with complete season 1 episodes. I titled those in order (The Americans - s01e01, etc.), then loaded the whole folder onto the iPad. Voilà! Infuse recognized the folder as a collection and auto-generated an ideal (DVD cover) graphic for it (including a “Season 1” caption). Touching the graphic revealed a similarly ideal sub-page with another (promo photo) graphic, listing the episodes in numeric order, each accompanied by its IMDb info and plot summary. Simple and gorgeous. (Like me.) Big THANKS for your help!
