MediaScout

Metadata files MediaScout writes

For every movie folder MediaScout writes:

File Format
movie.nfo Kodi/XBMC NFO
mymovies.xml My Movies / Media Browser XML

For every TV show folder MediaScout writes:

File Format
tvshow.nfo Kodi/XBMC NFO
series.xml TheTVDB-style XML

And for every episode, alongside the video file:

File Format
<episode>.nfo Kodi/XBMC NFO
<episode>.xml TheTVDB-style XML

Writing both an .nfo and an .xml per title is deliberate: it lets a single MediaScout-managed library folder be picked up natively by either family of media-center software below, without any conversion step.

.nfo files — Kodi (formerly XBMC)

The .nfo sidecar format was created by XBMC (renamed Kodi in 2014) as a way to supply a media item's metadata locally instead of relying on Kodi's online scrapers every time the library is scanned. It's a plain XML file with a root element named after the media type (<movie>, <tvshow>, <episodedetails>, ...) and is still Kodi's officially documented local-metadata format today; it's also read directly by Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin for compatibility.

MediaScout's MovieNFO, TVShowNFO, and EpisodeNFO models (MediaScoutGUI/Models/NFO/) implement this schema. The TVShowNFO/EpisodeNFO source even carries the original developer's reference comment pointing at the old XBMC wiki article the schema was written against (http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=NFO_files/tvshows) — that specific URL no longer resolves since the project and its wiki moved to Kodi, but the current, actively-maintained documentation lives at:

mymovies.xml — My Movies / Media Browser

My Movies for Windows Media Center was a movie/TV collection manager and Windows Media Center front-end from My Movies AB. It stored each title's metadata as an unencrypted mymovies.xml file next to the video, plus a shared ImagesByName folder of actor/director photos (ImagesByName\<Person Name>\folder.jpg) — both conventions MediaScout's PersonXML.GetMyMoviesDirectory()/GetMyMoviesFileName() and the ImagesByNameLocation setting deliberately mirror.

Media Browser (the Windows Media Center plugin that later became Emby, and whose open-source continuation lives on today as Jellyfin) originally read that same mymovies.xml file for interoperability. When My Movies started encrypting mymovies.xml in its v4.02 release (December 2011), Media Browser forked its own compatible-but-independent movie.xml format, closely modeled on the last unencrypted mymovies.xml schema. MediaScout's MovieXML model (MediaScoutGUI/Models/XML/MovieXML.cs) carries a source comment crediting Media Browser's saver code for its field layout, while still writing to the original mymovies.xml filename for maximum compatibility with both lineages:

series.xml / episode .xml — TheTVDB

TheTVDB is a community-maintained TV episode guide and metadata database. Its original v1 XML API returned series and episode records using field names like SeriesName, IMDB_ID, FirstAired, ContentRating, and zap2it_id (a US TV-listings/EPG identifier) — the same fields MediaScout's TVShowXML and EpisodeXML models (MediaScoutGUI/Models/XML/TVShowXML.cs, EpisodeXML.cs) use. XBMC's own TheTVDB scraper cached this data locally in the show's folder as series.xml, which is where the filename and schema MediaScout writes originate — the same on-disk convention used by numerous other XBMC/Kodi-era scrapers and media managers built around TheTVDB's data: