I recently decided to tackle a problem that has plagued me from the beginning in XBMC.

Some time ago, I changed the naming convention of my files to something that was cleaner and more logical to me. The format used to be like this example:

Burn Notice/Season 1/Burn Notice – 101 – Pilot.avi

I noted that having the name of the show was completely unnecessary, as was the season since I could infer from the number that it is season 1 episode 1.  So I spent some time renaming and moving things around to something more like this:

Burn Notice/101 – Pilot.avi

Much cleaner, no fluff.

The problem at first was that for some reason, this broke XBMC’s scraper’s fragile little mind, and thus it could not scrape episodes anymore. So I did some research and found that advancedsettings.xml offered a solution, which I mentioned in a previous post.

What I failed to mention in that post was that there was a single catch. One show I have is called “The 4400” which was tragically cancelled before its fifth and potentially last season. When I added the folder to the library, it would recognize the show title and apply a general synopsis I could view of the entire show, but the episodes contained within that folder refused to be scanned into the library database. I’ve suffered this for ages. Every time I reinstalled or upgraded or created a new instance of XBMC for PC or my Mac Mini, I copied over my custom advancedsettings.xml file to each.

As it turns out, the scraper problem has been fixed for ages, and my own solution was preventing it from working. Today I installed XBMC on my beloved laptop for the first time as an experiment, and I intentionally left the advancedsettings.xml file out. Sure enough, The 4400 scanned in immediately as well as all the episodes, synopses and screenshots.

So that’s that. I removed the “tvshowmatching” tag from the xml file and left my other customizations in place, as now the default setup works for me.