The Background

For some time now I have been recording films off cable using a DVD recorder. They then get compressed to MP4 of about 1GB in size, which seems to work OK for SD, using vidcoder. I have also upgraded my capturing chain, so some new captures are now done in HD with surround sound.

To date, captured material has been stored on a WD MyBook NAS (which is now full), and streamed across the network to WD Live nedia players (which are now showing their age).

So, I'm doing an upgrade over the festive season.

I have recently blown my tech budget for the next wee while and purchased an 8 Bay NAS, which I will be populating with some 6TB drives next week. I have also acquired relatively good android media players (Minix X8-H) which run XBMC. Im in the process of setting things up, and thought I would ask some questions.

Questions

1. How to Set up the Data Structure

All my films are currently in one bid directory, using [Moviename][year].mp4. This works OK for streaming to the WDs using DLNA. But to get XBMC working well with metadata each movie needs to be in its own sub-folder titled [moviename][year]. Is there any program that will automate taking a big directory full of MP4s, and moving each one into a sub-directory with the same name?

Given that there are around 3,000 files there (I have been capping for *years*), I sure as heck don't want to have to do it manually.

2. Which Media Manager to Use

I have heard good things about Ember Media Manager. Having never used one before, I am curious to know which media managers are favourites if VHers. I want something that will fairly painlessly scrape metadata, fanart etc. Given that I add 7-8 recordings per week, I also want something that copes well with updates, without re-scraping everything.

I will also continue to run WD Lives in spare rooms using DLNA, but I'm OK that they won't get the metadata that the XBMC clients will - tho it would be nice if they did.

3. Any Other Tricks

Does anyone out there have any other tricks or tips for setting up XBMC/Kodi on a NAS for streaming to multiple clients over a LAN?

Grateful for thoughts and suggestions.