Can MP follow directory shortcuts?

[Galileo]

Ok, here's the problem I'm faced with. I have 4 250Gig drives in my system and I'm backing up my DVD collection. This way I can view my DVD's without having to leave my chair to actually put one in. It works like a charm.

The problem is how to order them. I don't want to go browsing through 4 different subdirectories (mounted the drives as dirs) every time I want to see what I have. I could order them alphabetically, but since I'm buying new DVD's it would be a mess.

Therefor I thought it would be a nice idea to create shortcuts to every DVD, put those shortcuts in 1 directory and have the whole list there with all the DVD's I have. If I want to view one I would just click the one I like and it would automatically direct to the right drive & dir. I wouldn't have to remember where I stored each single one, since I only have to create a new shortcut every time I backup a DVD.

I haven't been able to get MP to 'see' the shortcuts, so how do I do that? Is MP even capable of doing that?

[yahoodee]

afaik you will see all your movies when you change your view.

[skinnedpuppy]

Isn't there some Raid Configuration that will treat all drives as one? Raid 0 i think.

Not much help though if you've already started filling them unless you ahve a shedload of other storage or lots of spare time

[Galileo]

Originally Posted by yahoodee

afaik you will see all your movies when you change your view.

I used all the views available and I made sure the permissions on the shortcuts are correct, but no luck. In the video-view it just won't show any shortcut/movie, it will only display subdirectories but no files.

Originally Posted by skinnedpuppy

Isn't there some Raid Configuration that will treat all drives as one? Raid 0 i think.

Not much help though if you've already started filling them unless you ahve a shedload of other storage or lots of spare time

Yes I know I can buy RAID controllers to support my drives, but if you want a good raid controller that'll cost you a lot of money. Creating a shortcut/hyperlink would not only be beneficial in my case if you have lots of DVD's, it would also remove the necessity of physically having all the files present on the computer. This way you could link to multiple drives, multiple computers and multiple partitions without the need to place them all in the same directory.

Oh, and RAID 0 has another disadvantage, it puts the files on 2 drives to speed up the write processes but if 1 drive fails it would mean I would lose out on 500GB, whereas if that same drive fails I now would only lose 250GB.

[Galileo]

Originally Posted by Galileo

Ok, here's the problem I'm faced with. I have 4 250Gig drives in my system and I'm backing up my DVD collection. This way I can view my DVD's without having to leave my chair to actually put one in. It works like a charm.

The problem is how to order them. I don't want to go browsing through 4 different subdirectories (mounted the drives as dirs) every time I want to see what I have. I could order them alphabetically, but since I'm buying new DVD's it would be a mess.

Therefor I thought it would be a nice idea to create shortcuts to every DVD, put those shortcuts in 1 directory and have the whole list there with all the DVD's I have. If I want to view one I would just click the one I like and it would automatically direct to the right drive & dir. I wouldn't have to remember where I stored each single one, since I only have to create a new shortcut every time I backup a DVD.

I haven't been able to get MP to 'see' the shortcuts, so how do I do that? Is MP even capable of doing that?

I've been trying to catch up if anything came up during new MP versions, but I can't see anything. I tried adding a *.lnk file in the show video files view, but clicking that one doesn't work.

I hate to bother the undoubtly busy developers team, but it would be really helpful to create a sort of 'hyperlinked' subdirectory which would link to various drives, various shares etc. Following links, even streamed ones possibly, could be a real value adding perspective, given that it's not uncommon for media center users to have more than 1 storage area.

[reagan+carter]

http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/an..._mp-t9965.html

[Galileo]

Originally Posted by reagan+carter

http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/an..._mp-t9965.html

Thanks, this is what I wanted. I do have a small remark though, it only works on the computer the files/directories are actually located. I have a fileserver doing all of my fileserving to keep a centralised storage in the network and it turns out that if you make junctions on the mediacenter it doesn't work but it does work if you create junctions on the fileserver.

So if anybody like me has a fileserver in place and simply links the mediacenter to the fileserver you should run the junction creation software on the fileserver. Too bad the NTFSLink software needs to reboot the server though.

[James]

If you are using NTFS it supports soft links (directories) and hard links (files) like in Unix. There are just no programs provided with XP to manage them, but you can find many free utils on the net which can.

http://shell-shocked.org/article.php?id=284