Glossary

Glossary

• Cache

MC uses a cache mechanism to speed the display of the Movie & TV show information. Basically MC stores the contents of each nfo file into its own dedicated file so that it only needs to load a single file on start-up instead of a lot of individual files. As information is changed by the user of MC, both the nfo & the cache files are updated.

• Fanart

Fanart are pictures that are based on a Movie or TV Show that have been created by fans of the show.

• File Extension

Used by MC to determine if a particular file is a video file or not. The file extension is the characters after the last '.' character in the filename. As an example, the filename 'video.mpg', the extension is 'mpg'.

• Genres

A type or category of movie such as Action, Romance, Science Fiction. A particular movie can have more than one genre in order to define its category better.

• nfo

Used by MC & XBMC to store information relating to a particular video file. Examples of what is stored in the file are the 'Movies Name', 'Genre' & 'Plot'. MC creates the nfo files which are in a compatible format for XBMC to import.

• Online/Offline Movies

An online movie as far as MC is concerned is defined as a video file that is actually stored on a device that allows direct playback by MC or XBMC.

An offline movie is something like a DVD or Bluray that needs to be physically loaded in order to play the file. MC allows the information about a particular offline movie to still be generated & integrated into MC as if the movie was online.

• Posters

Posters are pictures depicting a Movie or TV Show. Usually they are designed to advertise an upcoming show. Like fanart, they can be downloaded & shown in MC.

• Regex

Provides a concise and flexible means for matching strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. Further information can be found here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression

• Sets

Sets is a feature of XBMC to allow you to group related movies for display purposes. Instead of listing as an example all of the Star Trek movies, XBMC will list a folder named 'Star Trek Movies' for example. If you select that folder XBMC will then show you all of those movies separately. It is basically a method to reduce the list sizes for large video collections to make it easier to navigate the lists.

• Scraper, Scrape, Rescrape

A scraper is a list of instructions that a program uses to retrieve information about a Movie or TV Show usually from a web site. A scraper for example may return a movies title, genre or plot. MC uses scrapers to populate all of the information about a Movie or TV Show.

• Screenshot

Is a picture of a single frame from a video file. Usually the particular frame is chosen as a representation of what the TV Show episode is about.

• Specials

TV Shows sometimes have special episodes. These are episodes outside of the normal season episodes. An example of that would be a Christmas special. In most cases they are defined as Season 0 (zero) so that they can be grouped & displayed in a concise way along with the usual seasons.

• Trailers

Are short video clips to advertise an upcoming movie. Some movies have more than one trailer.

• XBMC

An advanced Media Player capable of running on multiple operating systems & hardware. A good summary can be found here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodi_(software)