How do you arrange your movies on disk (1 Viewer)

[e_razor]

I'm hoping this post will aid the developers in harnessing the power of Moving pictures.
The question is simple, how are your movies organized on your storage media (thinking harddrive storage here). Either if the drives are directly located in the media portal computer or if they are networked by samba, windows shares or such. And what kind of folder structure you are using.

My setup is as follows.
Movies are located on a Win2k3 server and shared, not using mapped network drives. Instead pointing mediaportal and plugins to the shared folder on the server.
Folder structure is like this:
\\fileserver\storage\movies
|->
...\divx
...\anime
...\720p
...\1080p

Folder names: Movie title (year) (ie. Bad Santa (2003) )
Inside each folder:
Movie file (not decided fully on renaming each file to its imdb id: ie ttxxxxx.avi yet) (ie. Bad Santa (2003).avi)
folder.jpg (the cover i've selected for the movie, usually the best/highres, best looking cover/poster i can find)
backdrop.jpg (same story here)

I think it would be a great help to developers if some users would share how they store their movie files, making the plugin able to adapt to how people store their movies, either trough options dialog or automaticually.

I'll consider adding some sort of poll for this if there's a lot of response

 

[fforde]

I get the impression you are talking about navigating your movies based on folder structure or something similar? This falls under filtering which is scheduled for two versions down the line (maybe late January, wild guess). There is some good discussion about it in a few other threads on the forum and the issue on the tracker is here:

Issue 38 - moving-pictures - Google Code



Edit: By the way the plug-in already will pickup backdrops and covers from your folder you have your movie saved. See this thread.

 

[dir]

fwiw, my collection is:

- stored on a W2K3 server
- using UNCs, not shared drives (I HATE shared drives)
- no special security (r/w permission by default because I back everything up to tape anyway)

Share is "\\server\media", with the following subdirectories:

\\server\media\tv
\\server\media\HD Movies
\\server\media\Kids Movies
\\server\media\movies
\\server\media\movies\Back in Black
\\server\media\movies\Back in Black\Back in Black.avi
\\server\media\movies\Back in Black\Back in Black.jpg
\\server\media\movies\Back in Black\Back in Black_1.jpg
\\server\media\movies\Back in Black\Back in Black_2.jpg
\\server\media\movies\Beyond Thunderdome
\\server\media\movies\Beyond Thunderdome\Beyond Thunderdome CD1.avi
\\server\media\movies\Beyond Thunderdome\Beyond Thunderdome CD2.avi
\\server\media\movies\Beyond Thunderdome\Beyond Thunderdome.jpg

- trailers are kept separately
- there may or may not be a "folder.jpg" in the folder, but usually not
- multiple cover images increment the "_1", "_2" appendage (a Meedio thing)
- images ALWAYS have the exact same name as the movie file (without the " CD1")
- occasionally I'll include the movie year in parenthesis in the filename

 

[rasmuskarlsen]

I can't belive you wan't to spend so much time arranging your movies, with correct name and path! I can't see the point!
I have a folder named \Movies\ And in there goes all movies --> \Movies\Movie1\Movie.mkv... And --- > \Movies\Movie2\Movie.mkv... Etc. And of course the Movie1, Movie2, etc.. Folders have the correct name, so MP can detect them.
Simple and easy Sofar it count's 311 Movies, DVDR and HD..

 

[marvenius]

I don't care much about organizing the files either. I just want to watch a movie. scroll through Moving Pictures et voila: movie
Mine are btw organized as H:\movies\Moviename.x folder\Moviename.y file (either multipart or single file, iso or avi) x and y can differ.

 

[dir]

I've got over 1500 movies and I've learned from experience that naming them consistently saves a huge amount of work when you want to use a different application for viewing them. I originally used one of those network set top box things when I only had a few dozen, then I started using Meedio, then I tried out XBMC, and later MP. Each one has different expectations and ways to configure the movie files, and having to manually clean up or change file names to make them work with the app was a pain.
Then there's the different ways that dvd covers are handled, or fanart, banners, trailers, and other associated files. Without a consistent naming convention, these quickly become increasingly problematic.

I know some people just download scene rips and stick them somewhere that makes it easy to continue sharing them; or just dump them all in one place without changing their original names. And I guess if you only have a couple of hundred movies, it might not be a big deal if it's easy to access them within a home theatre app. To each his own.

 

[vl002001]

I just have all my movies in a c:\movies and then c:\movies\unwatched.. it's worked pretty well so far.

I'm looking to get the year appended to each of the files. But I'm sure as hell not going to rename each movie c:\movie\movie (2008).avi, is there a quicker way to do this automatically?

 

[rasmuskarlsen]

I've got over 1500 movies and I've learned from experience that naming them consistently saves a huge amount of work when you want to use a different application for viewing them. I originally used one of those network set top box things when I only had a few dozen, then I started using Meedio, then I tried out XBMC, and later MP. Each one has different expectations and ways to configure the movie files, and having to manually clean up or change file names to make them work with the app was a pain.
Then there's the different ways that dvd covers are handled, or fanart, banners, trailers, and other associated files. Without a consistent naming convention, these quickly become increasingly problematic.

I know some people just download scene rips and stick them somewhere that makes it easy to continue sharing them; or just dump them all in one place without changing their original names. And I guess if you only have a couple of hundred movies, it might not be a big deal if it's easy to access them within a home theatre app. To each his own.

You must be a big fan of divx movies... He. Having 1500 movies in HD and DVD quality, would require an INSANE amount of harddisk space!!

 

[marvenius]

Well, since storage is getting cheaper and cheaper (per GB) and raid controllers also, this could very well be possible. I'm only entering the TB space, but a colleague of mine has 16TB of storage at home... We don't even have that much storage @work....
When you consider a random mix of HD, DVD and xvid|divx this could very well be possible for 1500 movies...

 

[e_razor]

I've got over 1500 movies and I've learned from experience that naming them consistently saves a huge amount of work when you want to use a different application for viewing them. I originally used one of those network set top box things when I only had a few dozen, then I started using Meedio, then I tried out XBMC, and later MP. Each one has different expectations and ways to configure the movie files, and having to manually clean up or change file names to make them work with the app was a pain.
Then there's the different ways that dvd covers are handled, or fanart, banners, trailers, and other associated files. Without a consistent naming convention, these quickly become increasingly problematic.

I know some people just download scene rips and stick them somewhere that makes it easy to continue sharing them; or just dump them all in one place without changing their original names. And I guess if you only have a couple of hundred movies, it might not be a big deal if it's easy to access them within a home theatre app. To each his own.

My thougths exactly, i'm nearing 700 movies these days. Having a naming scheme thats consistant is very vital, database rebuilds, moving from different mediacenter solutions, different plugins to handle movies and often people copy from my collection for use in mediacenter applications. Having named them and stored movie art with them saves such incredible amounts of time. I had em like you describe; just tossed em in a folder; named as they come from the scene. A typical database rebuild was a tedious process, maybe 300 movies had to be manually corrected. That is not a very plesant task, better to do the dirty job once than every time you make changes. Sure it was pretty damn boring renaming 700 movies but so worth it in the end... Kinda why i started this thread, to see how people solved this problem. Maybe even i could pick up some good ideas