Interesting stuff.

If you want to go directly to the app, click here: DivX Connected Metadata Generator

I've had my D-Link DSM-330 DivX Connected player for a while now, and I'm using it to stream all my music, photos and especially my DivX (and Xvid) movies to the TV in my living room.

When I'm browsing through my list of movies, I like to see extra bits of information such as the year the film was released, a brief synopsis, and even the IMDB rating. The DivX Connected software, which partners the device and catalogues and streams all the content from my PC, allows me to specify this extra information for each of my movies. The only trouble is that copying and pasting bits of text from the IMDB site into the property sheet of each movie is not a particularly stimulating way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Being the web geek that I am, I set out to find an alternative way to get this info into my library. I mulled it over for a few weeks and finally came up with a solution that I think strikes a good balance between manual input and automation. I've written a small web application that takes a list of IMDB film IDs, fetches their data from the IMDB site and produces the XML metadata files that can be automatically read by the DivX Connected software.

Here's how it works:

1. Get the IMDB ID of the movie or movies you want the data for. This is the code beginning with 'tt' in the URL of a movie's page on IMDB, e.g.: 'tt0371746' in http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0371746/
2. Optionally specify a name to use for the generated metadata file. This file will need to be named the same as your movie file, with a file extension of .emd. For instance, if you have a movie with a file name of 'Iron Man (2008).avi', your meta data file will be named: Iron Man (2008).avi.emd. So this step allows you to get the name of the metadata file right the first time around.
3. Click 'Submit' and the app will go off and find the your movie data.
4. You'll get a download link for each of the generated files. Download the file and move it into the same folder as your movie file. If you skipped step 2 above, you will have to rename the file to match that of the filename of the movie (preserving the .emd on the end).
5. That should normally be enough. You might need to tell the player to rescan the folder when you're back at the TV, or you might even need to remove and re-add the folder in the DivX Connected software (this seems to be necessary when you've already entered some data for a movie.
6. The metadata file will contain the movie's title, year of release, genre, a brief synopsis and IMDB rating.
7. This has been tested and works fine on sofware version 1.3.0 Build: 58. It may work on later releases and should work on earlier releases as well.
8. It requires JavaScript to function properly.

So, enough talk. Click here for the DivX Connected Metadata Generator.

Oh, and leave a comment to let me know what you think