BIg Pimpin: Content Organization

Anyone can dump their movies and tv shows into a folder and browse through them. Without directory and file name changes, slowly decoding and decrypting the original file names into something usable is a bit of a nightmare, if not just plain ghetto. We want our Xbox media center to look professional, and impress our visitors.

Read more to find out what you can do to organize your content.

File Names

The first step is to rename your files. If you attained your content from "other places" it may look something like this War.Of.The.Worlds.XVID.DVDRip.CD1-APX.avi. Sure its not difficult to realize this is the first disc to War of the Worlds, but hey, its just plain ugly, if not a bit incriminating. Do your self a favor and join the 2 discs into one video file, and rename it to War of the Worlds.avi. If you're leaving it as 2 discs and using stacking, rename each disc to War of the Worlds-CD*.avi, replacing the * for the disc number of course. Using the -CD* is a perfect format for Xbmc's stacking function. It will remove the extension and show one file, rather than two, when browsing. IMDB searches will also go much more smoothly now that you've conformed to proper naming conventions.

Directory Structure

Ok, now that your movies and Tv shows look great, let's look at your directory structure. When you first set up Xbmc, you had about ten or so video files. But over the months, you've bought a 300 gig hard drive for archiving, read about broadcatching and set up Azureus to capture all of your favorite Tv shows automatically. Now you have over 40 - 60 video files in your Video folder. Get rid of it!

By simply adding genre named sub-directories, your media center will be usable and more presentable. Take your movies and break them up into genres, then add a directory for each of those genres and sort your movies into them. Keep a directory called New Releases for your newest movies. I usually give my new movies about a month lifespan in the New Releases directory before filing them into their genres. I use Specials as a sort of miscellaneous directory.



Setting up your directories for Tv isn't any harder. I like to have three main directories. Full Season, Now Playing, and Specials. All of my incoming Tv shows from my broadcatching system get copied to the Now Playing directory once they are done downloading. I carried that convention over from my Tivo. So now all of my newest shows are in one directory. Simple! My Specials directory is just like the one in my movies section, used for miscellaneous Tv content.



My final folder, Full Seasons is where I archive all of my Tv content away. Certain shows like, House, I like enough to keep. So inside I have directories named via show titles. Inside them I divide each season into its own separate directory.



Cleaning up your content and dividing it into logical areas is key to having an easy to use media center. You will not only find things faster, enjoy using it more, but it will look much more refined and finished.

Disclaimer: I AM married and not all content shown represents my taste and my taste only :)