Removable disks handling? (1 Viewer)

[MasterV]

First off, awesome plugin! I love it. I had a question about removable disk handling. This is sort of complicated but I hope someone can follow it. I think this would be important to figure out for future versions.

I have two servers, ASUKA and REI. MediaPortal is installed on REI; ASUKA is the file server (where all of my video, music files etc. are located). In MovingPictures, I have a single monitored folder Z:\My Videos. This monitored folder is actually a mapped network drive that points to "\\ASUKA\media$". Here is where it gets interesting. Yesterday, I installed a new hard disk on ASUKA (the file server) and decided to move all of my media files to the new hard disk. I figured MediaPortal + MovingPictures would freak out if the files just moved to a new location so I first exited MediaPortal. On my file server, I moved all of the files to the new hard disk and then recreated the share as \\ASUKA\media$. This is exactly what the share was called before. I then went back to REI and checked my mapped network drive (Z:\) and everything was working fine. However, when I started up MovingPictures, it thought all of my files were no longer there. It actually gave me an error saying it couldn't find "USER 2" (not even sure what that is. Seems like a volume label). Basically, I had to import all of my media files again. The really odd thing, MP-TVSeries had no issue with this. Basically, I have MP-TVSeries setup very similar. It points to "Z:\My TV Series" which also points back to the same share "\\ASUKA\media$". Why would MovingPictures have this issue? Somehow MP-TVSeries seems to have figured out the swap but MovingPictures was confused.

Anyway, reading through that, I can see it is extremely confusing but I wanted to post it as I would love to know if this could be looked at. I only had 100 or so movie files but I'd hate to move around a very large library and have it rescan every time. It seems that since I had the same mapped network drive (Z:\) pointing to the same share "\\ASUKA\media$" that MovingPictures should have just done business as usual.

Thanks. Let me know if I can supply more details.

 

[fforde]

What you are describing happens because we not only track the filename of a movie, but also the serial number of the hardware the file is on. Primarily this is meant for optical media but I think there is a case for getting rid of the check for some types of network drives. This is something we need to think about a little bit though. There is an issue scheduled for 0.9 to deal with issues like what you are describing though, so we will definitely take a look at this and come up with some sort of solution.

 

[MasterV]

Ahh. That makes sense then. I wondered if it was something like that. As I said, it wasn't a big deal because MovingPictures found all of my files again and added them mostly automagically (which it is great at). The only real issue was that I lost my stats for what was viewed. Anyway, thanks for all the hard work on this plugin and for responding so quickly. Maybe there will be a solution for this in the future. I won't be moving anything around for a while

 

[armandp]

Actually the real issue is: Issue 346 - moving-pictures - Update Import Path - Google Code (a workaround is in there too) but i agree we are too strict with the whole serial thing currently. We'll come up with a solution

 

[MasterV]

After reading through that issue on Google Code, I wonder if maybe MovingPictures should WRITE [MovieName].nfo files or [MovieName].xml files (or some plain text file) back to the source directory with some basic data like the Viewed/Watched status etc. This might help make things more portable when users are moving files around. I understand it can already read NFO but if it could also automatically write data back out to .nfo files, that would be cool. Is there a feature request link somewhere? Should I move this there.

Thanks again for all your work.

 

[armandp]

After reading through that issue on Google Code, I wonder if maybe MovingPictures should WRITE [MovieName].nfo files or [MovieName].xml files (or some plain text file) back to the source directory with some basic data like the Viewed/Watched status etc. This might help make things more portable when users are moving files around. I understand it can already read NFO but if it could also automatically write data back out to .nfo files, that would be cool. Is there a feature request link somewhere?

The NFO import already exists as Issue 121 - moving-pictures - write NFO files that help with future rescans - Google Code

and in other news: your original problem will be solved in 0.8 (Issue #346)