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:
