Currently there are three scrapers that can be used for regular anime series: tvdb, anidb, and anime news network. As far as I can tell, nobody really cares to use ANN for scraping and mainly stick with tvdb or anidb. Both have slight differences in their scraping results and how they will end up showing the anime list that you have. For use in a couple examples, we are going to use Bleach and Dog Days.
In the case of tvdb, it follows the western format of a single television show. The format is shown with the season number followed by the episode number within the season, so people who want to keep the seasons of a series together in a single sort of entry like Dog Days and Dog Days' under a parent folder of "Dog Days" should probably be using tvdb. Renaming your anime to follow something like "anime seasonxepisode.mkv" makes scraping actually work (unless you go with tv show matching, which also can work), so our Dog Days episode would be "Dog Days 01x05 [Hiryuu-HiNA].mkv" and you can add some other additional information if you wanted (ie. [Hiryuu-HiNA][Hi10p][720p][BD+Flac]). This causes some issues with anime like Bleach which use absolute order and thus have episode numbers that are continuous until the end of the anime. TVDB separates Bleach into 16 seasons, each with episodes restarting from 1 until the end of the season, and thus isn't optimal since although Bleach can be split into seasons, who actually watches Bleach by season? When you talk about Bleach or Naruto, it's not "oh did you watch season 8 of Bleach?" but rather "did you see the soul society arc?"
With the tvdb organization of things, it gets hard to find specific arcs of longer anime like Bleach, Naruto, Blood+, but for actual seasonal anime (Oreimo, Dog Days, Angel Beats, etc.) it works fairly well.
AniDB is slightly different in that each season could be treated as a completely different series depending on if the season actually has a specific name, such as Dog Days and Dog Days' getting two separate entries when shown on your XBMC setup. For some people that is ok, as you would be able to access any episode from Dog Days, Dog Days', and Bleach without having to search through seasons. One thing to keep in mind though is that for the most part, anime series keep the same banner, poster, etc. artwork for each season, so if you use a view where you only see like the banners or posters, you won't be able to quickly tell seasons apart since you can't actually see the name. Another thing to keep in mind with AniDB is that it has listings for not only the anime episodes, but opening and ending credits, and OVAs etc. that aren't present in tvdb since they aren't exactly considered specials or part of the season.
For my own personal setup, I am currently interchanging between tvdb and anidb based on the anime series. So anime that have only a single season are scraped from anidb and anime with multiple seasons (like Oreimo or Dog Days or Haganai) are scraped from tvdb. This also has it's downfalls as any anime with multiple seasons won't have the OP/ED scraped, but for the most part, it is my preferred setup.
An optional idea is to go in after scraping the large majority of your anime and modifying/creating .nfo files for the other videos that require it (so my setup would mean making .nfo files from AniDB for the OP/ED of the series that have them).
Now on to other things...XBMC may or may not be able to play your anime with the amazing perfection that you could have with all of your filters or mpv or w/e. Luckily enough, the XBMC devs are amazing badasses and have you covered. You can actually have XBMC use external players to play your videos OR in Windows, you can optionally try using XBMC DSPlayer which is just a build which allows the use of direct show filters. The wiki probably can explain better than I can and so to be lazy, I'll just redirect to there instead: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=External_players
As a sidenote, the Aeon Nox skin is pretty nice in terms of customization as well as available views.
No comments:
Post a Comment