In the latest (version 11) release of XBMC, the ability to add single videos manually to the XBMC library has been removed. In version 10, all one had to do was right-click on a video file in the XBMC user interface, and from the contextual menu that appeared select “Manually add to library”. This is no longer the case in version 11, but rather than go into the potential reasons for the removal of the feature, let’s simply describe how to add a single video file manually.
This is obviously most useful for media files which aren’t detected automatically by XBMC’s media scrapers. In the example I’m using, it’s a technical presentation made by the Nuxeo ECM developers.
First, one has to create an NFO file for each video that needs to be added to the XBMC library. Ensure that both the video file and NFO file are both placed in a directory which is already an XBMC media source. Use your favourite text editor to create the file, give it an .nfo extension, and name it after the same name as your source video file:
The contents of the NFO file are very simple – the “title” value should match the name of the video file, for example:
<movie> <title>Digital_Asset_Management_with_Nuxeo</title> </movie>
Finally, firing up XBMC and running a media scan (or not, if you’ve set it up to do it automatically) will result in the video being available for playback from your XBMC library:
Hi Dave, we have found with the new XBMC that is is perfectly fine and easy to watch anything through the media centre on the computer (in other words, all of our media content either on the computer or on external hard drives is available for playback in XBMC – without having to make an NFO file or anything), but we are completely unable to get anything new to watch on the XBox. Even if it says it’s available in XBMC on the computer, it doesn’t turn up on the XBox, even after restarting both. All that turns up on the XBox is all the stuff we originally had on there (which we can still watch).
What can we do?? Am I doing something wrong? If I make an NFO file for every single episode of every single thing I want to watch, will it work then?? Or is the problem maybe that the new stuff we want to watch is on an external hard drive, and there’s no room for it on the computer, but the XBox only detects what’s on the computer??? Urrgh, trying to work out how to fix this was very frustrating, and we would really appreciate your advice!
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