2 folders, one list? (2 Viewers)

[foobart]

angusmann,

The problem is not with creating junction points to folders. I was able to do that too, but the issue is whether it solves the actual problem.

Basically, the issue is about getting one (flat) list of all the movies/videos to browse. The way MediaPortal seems to work is,

1) you specify the shares (folders) you have your movies/videos in. Let's say these are in .ISO files.

2) Mediaportal lists the individual shares in the "My videos" (movies view). You can go to the individial shares(folders) and see the movies in each of the shares.

3) It DOES NOT seem to traverse down sub-folders and gather up the movie titles. Nor does it like/traverse soft links (shortcuts).

So, If you have c:\movies , d:\movies etc., making a junction point(an additional folder) and creating a subfolder (d_movies) inside say c:\movies doesn't solve the problem because it will just show up as a folder, and one will have to go into it to see the titles in d_movies, which is worse since d:\movies is already available at the top level in My Videos.

What we seem to be looking for is either for MediaPortal to be able to read and list soft links , ability to create hard links across drives, or to be able to create a virtual directory which contains CONTENTS of several other directories.

Am I missing something ?

 

[angusmann]

Hi again..I sill don't quite understand why linking won't solve the problem but here's another suggestion.

Windows 200 and Windows XP both support "Dynamic Disks. There are several different types but I think a "spanned" disk would suit your problem best.

The idea is that you take 2 or more hard disks (or partions) and create a larger virtual drive. Windows and other programs will treat this virtual drive as though it were a single drive, but with a capacity equal to the sum of all the drives or partitions.

Here's a link to some more description of spanned drives
http://www.theeldergeek.com/hard_drives_10.htm

No I have not tried it...

 

[CHli]

I have this exact issue..

I have several disks (5) on which I have movies.

I have foreign films that don't appear in imdb, so there is no way to get them into the database without actually hand-editing (not very feasible).

The ability to see all the movies in one place would be really helpful. Any way to do this?

At the moment the only solution is to add the movies that are not in IMDB manually if you want to have the DB view with all the movies.

If you want all the movies to appear in the share view without going trough subdirectory just don't create them and copy all the movies in one single folder.

Else you'll have to wait for an update and post a feature request.

 

[foobart]

It's probably a good idea to summarize, for those looking this up in the future:

There is no solution to the original problem as of now, nothing suggested actually works.

The only way you'd get one flat list is to have all the movies in only one folder (implying one disk, not considering RAID configs).

 

[portal user]

Hi,
Why not use ntfslink?

From http://www.elsdoerfer.info/ntfslink/.
So, what's a hard link anyway?
If you are an experienced user of any *nix operating system (i.e. Linux) and familiar with file systems such as ext2, ext3 or reiserfs, you probably know what a hard link is.
If you do not, this is what the Platform SDK says:

A hard link is the file system representation of a file by which more than one path references a single file in the same volume. Many changes to that file are instantly visible to applications that access it through the hard links that reference it. However, the directory entry size and attribute information is updated only for the link through which the change was made.
In short: A hard link allows you have the very same file in multiple locations in your file system, without wasting additional space. The difference to a shortcut is, that a hard link represents exactly the linked file. An application can open the file and write to it, without even knowing it is a link.

I think I remember that someone reported it working with MP

Best Regards

Portal user

 

[bedlam]

This is a feature I too would appreciate very much.
I don´t like to use the database since it´s way to slow and overkill for what I need, my movies is far to...shortlived (keep for a while, watch, delete)
I don´t think it would be that hard to implement either..

 

[foobart]

Hi,
Why not use ntfslink?

From http://www.elsdoerfer.info/ntfslink/.
So, what's a hard link anyway?
If you are an experienced user of any *nix operating system (i.e. Linux) and familiar with file systems such as ext2, ext3 or reiserfs, you probably know what a hard link is.
If you do not, this is what the Platform SDK says:

A hard link is the file system representation of a file by which more than one path references a single file in the same volume. Many changes to that file are instantly visible to applications that access it through the hard links that reference it. However, the directory entry size and attribute information is updated only for the link through which the change was made.
In short: A hard link allows you have the very same file in multiple locations in your file system, without wasting additional space. The difference to a shortcut is, that a hard link represents exactly the linked file. An application can open the file and write to it, without even knowing it is a link.

I think I remember that someone reported it working with MP

Best Regards

Portal user

Oh boy,

same suggestion again.. ntfslink as it says in the website, makes it easy to do junction points and hard links. However, hard links cannot be made to files on a different filesystem/disk. So this does not work.

 

[puppetj]

hey, just use myHTPC, UNTILL THE FEATURE IS ADD, IVE BEEN TRYING ALSO for this to be added, but no luck, pm for link

 

[Darre]

Or use junctions which works perfect.

 

[solis66]

...keep going.

How do i do that?