It’s fairly common that for one reason or another, xbmc users need to move their video library from one location to another. Perhaps you’ve been using a single 1TB drive for your library, you’ve filled it up and upgraded to a 3TB drive and need to update the path for every movie and TV show to point to the new drive.
Or, in my case, you’ve been using windows samba-based streaming and want to move to the much more efficient NFS streaming protocol (see the comparison detailed in this post).
The simple way to change file locations is just to remove your old library, move the content, and then rescan the new destination to recreate your library in the new location. Unfortunately, this has a few big disadvantages, mainly that you lose each file’s watched status, watched count, and bookmarks, which is really annoying for large libraries.
Prerequisites
To use the solution below, there are a few things that will help ensure you can follow the steps without modification:
- Your movies and TV should be sorted into individual folders, with thumbnails, trailers, nfo files, etc. all in each individual movie folder. For example, the directory for the movie 300 would include the following files:
300 [top-level movie folder]
-> .actors [folder]
-> extrathumbs [folder]
-> 300.bluray.mkv
-> 300.bluray.nfo
-> 300.bluray.tbn
-> 300.bluray-fanart.jpg
-> 300.bluray-trailer.mp4
- If your library is not stored in this structure, try the ‘export library’ function within XBMC (settings –> video –> export library –> separate files) to dump all of these files to the movie directories.
- You’ll want to download a tool like SQLite (if you are NOT using a shared MySQL library) or Navicat Lite (if you are using MySQL to host a shared library for multiple machines). These will allow you to browse your database and update the paths where necessary. I used Navicat, so those of you not using a shared library will have to modify the instructions slightly below to do the same thing in SQLite, which I’m not familiar with.
- If using MySQL, you’ll need to remember your root password to the DB so that you can connect to it and manipulate the table data.
- To be safe, you should make a copy of your video DB before starting this as you are mucking around with the sql database and there is no easy way to undo mistakes you make. In Navicat, this is as easy as, right click on xbmc_video (your video database, and select “dump SQL file.”
Updating the video database with the new path
With those items laid out as pre-requisites, here is how it’s done:
- Close xbmc
- Move / copy your content to the new location
- Open your database using one of the tools above
- Open the ‘path’ table within the xbmc_video database (or MyVideos.db for non MySQL). See the screenshot below for an example using Navicat Lite. [the username/password in my smb path has been blocked out]
- You now need to open the MySQL console in Navicat to enter in the find/replace command for the path. The MySQL console can be accessed using the F6 key, or under Tools\Console in the main menu.
- You’ll use a command like the one below to do the find/replace. This is a good succinct explanation of the find/replace command in MySQL if you want more info.
mysql> update path set strPath = replace(strPath, ‘old path’, ‘new path’);
- To provide a real example, here is what I used:
mysql> update path set strPath = replace(strPath, ‘smb://username:password@servername/Movies/’, ‘/mnt/movies/’);
- This replaces all SMB paths with nfs mounted paths in my root filesystem. Note that if you have different variations of the old path in your library (some with password, some without, or a separate smb://user:pass@server:/TV/ (/pictures, etc.) you’ll need to issue the above command several times until all old paths are replaced with the new location. Make sure you have all items with the old path replaced and then move on below.
Now that this much is done, you have a library with an updated path pointing to your new file locations. However, a few problems remain to be resolved. First, we have to update your sources.xml file to point to the new location as well. This file is what tells XBMC where to look for future movie/TV updates.
- Open your userdata folder and edit the file sources.xml. Find all instances of your old path (smb://username:password@servername/Movies/ in my example) and replace with your new path.
Now, the hardest problem to solve. How to get XBMC to rehash all of your thumbnail files so that they still work with the new file locations. The reason this does not work automatically is that XBMC creates cached thumbnails based on the full path to the movie location. For example, if the original path was smb://username:password@servername/Movies/300, XBMC creates and caches a thumbnail based on a thumbnail hash for that directory in the userdata/Thumbnails directory.
If you change that path in the library like we did above from smb:// to /mnt/movies/300, the cached thumbnail will no longer work and you get a big ugly screen capture or no thumbnail at all in place of the thumbnail you want. The only way to force XBMC to rehash the thumbnail is to remove the item from your library or to manually refresh the information for every file in your library through a series of remote/keyboard clicks, so it’s totally impractical for a large library.
There are a lot of posts on the XBMC forums that involve using scripts to rehash the directory, but I couldn’t get any of these to work. As I was about ready to give up and just delete my library and start over, I stumbled onto a much easier solution that makes XBMC do all the heavy lifting.
Fixing the xbmc thumbnail cache after moving your library
- Start in Navicat, create a new database by right-clicking anywhere in the “connections” frame, call it anything you like… in this case, xbmc_video10 (yes, it took me 10 iterations to figure this out). Enter the same options as indicated below.
- This is all you need to do for now with Navicat.
- Edit advancedsettings.xml in your userdata folder to change the database name from the original name to the new name xbmc_video10.
<videodatabase>
<type>mysql</type>
<host>mysqlserverIP address</host>
<port>3306</port>
<user>xbmc</user>
<pass>xbmc</pass>
<name>xbmc_video10</name>
</videodatabase>
- Reopen xbmc. You’ll be starting with a blank video database.
- Optionally: you can delete all files in the thumbnail directory before starting this rescrape if you don’t want the extra thumbnails taking up space. I didn’t do this originally as I wasn’t sure it was going to work when I started, but I’m fairly certain you could without issue.
- Update your xbmc library (right-click somewhere in the library and choose update library). This will force a rescrape of all of the sources you had previously defined in the new location. While scraping the new locations, xbmc will properly create the cached thumbnail file based on the new location. If you have large library, this will take a fair amount of time.
- When done, navigate through your TV & Movie libraries and make sure everything is working. Thumbnails should show up, you should be able to play all files, etc.
- Close xbmc
So at this point we have all of our thumbnails working, but we’ve lost all of our watched history, watched counts, proper ordering for date added the library, etc. We have only one more step to pair the working thumbnails with complete library history.
- Edit your advanced settings.xml file again. This time, revert the change you made to the videodatabase name and enter the name of the original database. Save & close.
The next time you reopen xbmc, it will access your original library with updated paths, watched file history, and it will find all of the properly cached thumbnails that were created when you had it manually rescrape the library. Victory!
After recently dropping my satellite subscription and moving to MythTV, I needed to find a way to get HD video streams from my