One of the great features of Boxee is that it can scan your local media collection and retrieves artwork and information from IMDb.com. It does this by doing regular expression matching on each file name to determine what movie, album, or TV episode it is. If you have a collection that is not well named or organized this might not work correctly for a lot of your media files. Fortunately there is a specific way you can name your movie, music, and TV files to give the Boxee the best chance of to correctly identify your media collection.
Again, Boxee uses IMDb.com to identify and retrieve information about your media files. If you are unsure of a proper title, or having problems with identification, check there first and make sure it matches what they have.
TV Shows
TV episode file names are usually consisted of the show’s name, the season (usually indicated by the letter “S”, or just the number), the episode (usually indicated by the letter “E”, or just the number), the episode’s title, and some more info regarding the quality and source of the file.
Boxee currently supports the following types of naming conventions for tv shows.
Show.Title.S##E##.info.extension
(double digits are required: S#E# will not work.)
Examples:
The.Sopranos.S02E01.avi
Entourage.S05E01.avi
Please note: Adding the series’ release year in the file will help resolve remakes and TV shows with similar names
(please refer to IMDB.com to find the correct release year of the show)
Movies
Boxee currently supports the following naming convention for movies:
Title.(Year).extension
Title (Year).extension
Title.[Year].extension
Title [Year].extension
It is recommended that you add the movie’s release year for greater accuracy, especially when dealing with remakes.
Examples:
The.Day.the.Earth.Stood.Still.(1951).avi
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).avi
The.Day.the.Earth.Stood.Still.[1951].avi
The Day the Earth Stood Still [1951].avi
It is recommended that you add the movie’s release year for greater accuracy, especially when dealing with remakes.
For multi-part movie both part# and cd# are supported.
Title.(Year).part#.extension
Examples:
The.Simpsons.Movie.(2007).part1.avi
The.Simpsons.Movie.(2007).part2.avi
Music
With music the filename is not as important as the id3 tags.
id3 tags hold all the information such as album name, artist, year, genre and even artwork. Whatever is there, will be presented in Boxee, so be sure to include as much info as possible in your id3 tags.
Renaming Files
You can always use a third party application to help you rename the files. Most media players such as iTunes or Windows Media Player, also allow you to edit those tags, but you can also Google for some dedicated ID3 editors.
Manually Identify a File
In a few cases the file won’t be recognized even with these formatting tips. In this case select the media file and click the “Wrong Video?” button. You can then follow the on screen instructions to search for and the correctly identity the media file.