Playing from USB devices (1 Viewer)

[Spooky]

One thing that annoys me every time in MediaPortal and I find incredibly cumbersome is trying to play videos (or whatever) from USB devices that you plug in to your HTPC while running.

The theory is all well and good: leave the default option to automatically open connected drives activated and disable any auto play functionality of Windows. However, this is very unrealiable. On all the HTPCs where I use MediaPortal this simply does not work reliably. Depending on the drive that is used, or the position of the sun..., MediaPortal simply won't recognize the device, even though the drive is mounted correctly in Windows.

For instance, we have a WD passport drive that is never recognized by MediaPortal. We plug it in, we hear the USB connected sound of windows... and no matter how long you wait, nothing will happen in MediaPortal. When we exit MediaPortal we can see that the drive is mounted correctly and available for browsing.

Restarting MediaPortal won't help either, due to the requirement of the Video plug-in of having all Folders pre-determined. So if you don't have the drive letter of the USB device added to the list of video folders as well, you simply cannot access it in MediaPortal.


Is there anything else one can do to improve this behavior?

 

[Vasilich]

maybe adding a GUI button to force rescan all attached external devices would help?

 

[Deda]

Q is good, implementation is complicated as you know that drives/folders needs to be predefined to be accessible in plugins (Video, Music, Pictures) and drives/folders handling are deep in the MP core.

One thing that came on my mind is that USB drives can be handled similar as DVD's but not as auto played, instead they can be accessible as temporary drives in plugins.