USB drive share as folder (1 Viewer)

[joz]

Hi all,

This is not so much a bug as it is something that can be expected.
I have a couple of USB and e-sata HD drives which are off most of the time. They have movies (and other stuff on it) which is being indexed by Moving Pictures. So far so good.
The thing is I wanted to share these drives across the network. Since shares are forgotten for drives when you reboot or unplug them I mounted the drive to a folder on another partition too (so not just to a drive letter) and shared that folder. This way I do not need to re-share the drives constantly.

However this causes issues with moving pictures;
I believe this way moving pictures thinks the movies on these drives are accessible (although the drives are off) because the main folder (the mount point or whatever you would call it) exists. But they are not accessible, the only thing is that the main folder is there, the drives are off most of the time.
So whenever I accidentally pick one of these movies moving pictures hangs trying to access the file which it can't.

Am I right with the cause of this? If yes an easy fix would be not to check if the folder exists but to check if the movie itself exists.
Could be I'm completely wrong here but this behaviour is a fact. Would be nice (for me at least ) to get this fixed.

 

[armandp]

debug logs of you reproducing the scenario might help

(moving pictures uses a combination of volume serialnumber, root and actual file to determine wether a file is available btw)

 

[joz]

Will do armandp

---- EDIT----

There you have it, logs attached.
I'd like to add 2 things;
- I use a movie (countdown thingie) before a movie start
- When the crash happens I can see that there's supposed to be a guidialog yesno but it's not showing, it hangs on the end of the video it always plays at the start of a movie

 

[fforde]

So your USB drive is mounted to a subfolder in your main movies folder? I believe that if you place it separately and set the watch folder in Moving Pics to the actual mount point, Moving Pictures will detect that it's actually a removable source.

 

[joz]

No it is actually mounted within a subfolder of my global (windows) temp directory, not in a movie subfolder. The drives in question all are defined within moving pictures config pointing to the unique mounting folders.

I remember back in the days I could set something to removable but I guess you guess have a bit of magic for that now because I can't anymore.

The thing is the folders are always there, when I click it in explorer when the drives off I get an error. It's kinda behaving like a dvd drive in that aspect.

the logs did not make much sense to me, there was an error occurring over and over if I recall correctly. I'd appreciate any help on this but because it's such a niche thing I can understand if you wanna let it slight. Of course you'd have to be able to reproduce first, just hoping here not expecting anything.

 

[joz]

Is there any progress on this? Was anybody able to reproduce? If yes, will it be fixed?

If not I'll have to look for another, probably hardware based (such as a NAS) solution. Those things are 2 darn expensive though

 

[sskodje]

I dont know if i get your problem right, but do you mean that the shares from within moving pictures dissapear when you turn your external drives off?

Are your external drives shared like \\computer\drive?

If so, you can try make a network drive and share it instead.

If you mean that your network drive dissapears too, there are programs you can try for automaticly reconnecting your network drives. Network Drive Manager comes to mind, but i'm sure there are more

 

[joz]

This is a problem for all xp users and I think vista behaves the same. IF you plugin a USB drive and then share it, unplug it and turn your pc off. Restart the pc turn the usb drive back on and the share's gone. Just a windows thing

 

[marvenius]

you could do something with a batch script and the command "net share".
I recognize your problem, usually I just shut down windows (the HTPC) unplug the drive, take it to my friends to share, come back home, plug it in the exact same USB connector (the other fine implementation of USB...) and start the computer....
No harm is done, as my GF usually accompanies me to my friends (and their GF's), so then she can't use MP either