Multiple folders and drives (1 Viewer)

[gemini728]

I have a problem with MP and movies in different folders. I have a file server which has 4 hard drives, and the HTPC box has another 3 hard drives. All together I have about 2,500 movie files (DivX format). Some movies are comprised of 2 files, so the actual number of movies is about 1,600 to 1,800. As you can imagine, navigating all those drives and folders in MP can be very time consuming. I was using Meedio, and it combined the movies from the different drives into one searchable list. If I had to pick one area of MP to improve - this would be it.

I tried using the database feature in MP, but there are a couple of problems - first it is not perfect in its identification of the movies, so I have to manually update many of them. Second, it takes a VERY LONG time when you have as many movies as I have, not to mention TV shows.

So, my vote would go for adding the feature to duplicate what Meedio has, or to provide something similar.

MP has features that Meedio does not have and that makes it very attractive to me, so I hope the powers-that-be decide to add this functionality to MP.

 

[heathman001]

I've also got a lot of videos spread over a few small hard drives. They are spread out because they do not all fit on one single hard drive. So when I go to the videos section I have to choose between Videos1 Videos2 Videos3 and Videos4. Trying to remember on which drive a particular video is located is troublesome. It'd be nice if I could just check all of the drives as the "default folder" and MP would just pull all of the files into one big list. Alternatively I could set up raid, but it's a bit late for that.

 

[rekenaar]

The disks on the file server can be combined giving one entry point. The disks on the HTPC can be combined giving one entry point. That is with junctions (if you are using NTFS). At least then you have only two "disks".

This would just make it a bit easier while we wait for feedback on your improvement suggestion.

 

[druid9]

You need to use database rather than shares. This ought to solve all of your problems. Spanned disks are recognised if named appropriately so you don't end up with Eragon 1, Eragon 2 etc. You just need to tell MP in config where the files are, and it will scan them for you.

An alternative (which I haven't used) is the My Movies Plugin which takes data from an ANT database. With 1600 movies you might well have one of those.

One of the things which many folks seem to miss is that MP is database driven rather than using the Windows file structure, for movies and indeed for music. No need to tie yourself in knots over folder structures etc. In fact your movie files could be spread all over the place, and provided you told MP where to look, the database scan would find them and update them. You can also make manual entries, but that would take a long time with that many files