23 - Ripping and Playing TV Shows in XBMC
Having configured XBMC for PC games and the playback of movies from both discs and ripped images, the next step was to configure XBMC for TV Shows. XBMC makes it easy for you to navigate your TV Shows including selecting individual seasons and episodes within seasons. However, in order for this functionality to work, each episode needs to be a separate media file. Therefore, ripping a DVD disc which contains multiple episodes from a TV Show box set as an ISO image is not the best approach.
I am using SlySoft AnyDVD HD as I was already using this application to enable multi-region DVD and Blu-ray playback on my HTPC and to rip DVD and Blu-ray movies from the original disc.
When researching this topic I found these threads to be useful sources of information:
1) Ripping the DVD
For this example I will be using the 80 TV Show “Star Fleet” which was originally created in Japan where it was called “X-Bomber” and ran for 24 episodes. If you have not seen this show before, think of Thunderbrids crossed with Star Wars and you are not too far off. If you want to find out more about Star Fleet I would highly recommend that you check out
SFXB the Star Fleet (X-Bomber) homepage.
For me picture quality is more important than disc space, therefore as with ripping movies, I wanted to maintain the original video files and did not want to apply any compression to the media files. Therefore, I will be extracting the individual episode .VOB files from the DVD disc rather than ripping an ISO image of the complete disc.
To rip the .VOB files from a DVD I followed these steps:
Place the DVD disc in the optical drive and wait for AnyDVD HD to scan the disc
- Right-click on the AnyDVD HD icon on the toolbar and choose “Rip Video DVD to Harddisk”
- Select the destination folder. I typically create a separate folder (e.g. DVD_1) to rip each DVD from the box set to before transferring the files I want to keep to the final folder
- Click “Copy DVD” and wait around 15-20mins for the copy to complete
When the copying has completed you should see something like this (click for high resolution):
I then repeated this process for each of the other three discs in the Star Fleet box set, ripping each to a separate folder (e.g. DVD_2, DVD_3 & DVD_4) so that I can sort and rename the files before moving them to the final location on my NAS.
2) Setting up the TV Show Folders
In order to make it easy to navigate the TV Shows and for XBMC to use scrapers (e.g.
Online TV Database) to display fanart and episode information it is recommended to organise your TV shows into a hierarchy.
Unfortunately, Star Fleet only ran for one season because it was not very popular in Japan and all of the props, puppets and sets were destroyed in a warehouse fire shortly after the first series was transmitted, so my hierarchy will only have a single level.
3) Naming the media files
Before placing the files in the correct location in the file hierarchy, the next step is to name the files so that XBMC can identify which season and episode each file relates to. Looking through the various files that you have ripped from each DVD it should be straight forward to identify the individual episodes as they should be the largest .VOB files in the folder.
If you want to double check that you have the correct files you can always open them with a media player (e.g. e.g. Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5) that is capable of playing .VOB files that have been ripped from a DVD.
In the case of Star Fleet this was rather more complicated as each episode was spit across two separate .VOB files. The first and larger .VOB file (e.g. VTS_04_1.VOB) contained the opening credits, recap from the previous episode and most of the current episode. The second smaller .VOB file (e.g. VTS_04_2.VOB) contained the last few minutes of the current episode, a trailer for next week's episode and the closing credits.
The current build of XBMC does not support the use of episodes that are split across multiple .VOB files, therefore I used a utility called “
VOBMerge” to combine the two .VOB files into a single file .VOB file that XBMC could work with. Further research identified that there is a 1GB .VOB file size limit on DVDs, so this may be an issue with other box sets as well.
The “VOBMerge” utility is very easy to use and works very quickly with no degradation in image quality as it is doing a simple join of two files.
There are a number of standard naming conventions which XBMC and
TheTVDB scraper support. For more information on supported naming conventions see:
XBMC Wiki: TV Shows (Video_Library)
My personal preference is to use the following naming convention
"Series_Name.s##e##.VOB" where “s##” is the season number and “e##” is the episode number.
As Star Fleet has 1 season and 24 episodes the media files in my folder will be named Star_Fleet.s01e01.VOB through Star_Fleet.s01e24.VOB. Once I had merged and renamed each pair of .VOB files I moved them to the final location on my NAS as shown below (click for high resolution):
4) Configuring the Source
As this was the first TV Show that I had added to XBMC it was necessary to set up a content source to point to the TV Shows folder on my NAS. To achieve this I followed these steps:
• Go to “TV Shows” and "Add Source"
• Browse to TV Shows folder on my NAS
• Set the content type as “TV Show”
• Run a library update
5) Configuring Fanart and Episode Information
If XBMC is able to correctly identify the series the TV Shows scraper can download Fanart and episode information. However, I wanted to have complete control of the fanart used for each of my TV Shows.
Therefore I placed the image that I wanted to use as fanart in the Star Fleet folder. The image was 1920x1080 sized and named “fanart.jpg”
e.g. C:\Multimedia\TV Shows\Star Fleet\fanart.jpg
The image below illustrates the Star Fleet series home screen in XBMC with fanart, episode list and plot summary for the currently highlighted episode (click for high resolution):
And a screen shot showing episode 1 of Star Fleet playing through XBMC (click for high resolution):
James