WDTV Live Playlists + Network Share Links + Linksheets on Network Share

Hey guys,

Finally had time during reading week to fix up my media player. Installed mamba theme with linkedsheets (everything went fine and it looks great!!) and I guess I have three questions.

  1. I notice that my linksheets are not being saved on my network share, where all my HD movies are, but they are on my TV Shows which is on the local HDD. Its not a huge deal, but I do have to wait for the player to populate every folder art picture again. Is there a way around this?

  2. I would like to be able to look in one spot to see my TV, Movies and Music folders. However, my TV shows are on the local HDD while my Movies and Music folders are on my NAS. Is there a way that I can create a link on the root of the WDTV Live HDD to those folders?? So I can have all folders in one screen. I want this for ease of use and to be girlfriend friendly :slight_smile:

  3. I would also like the ability to just have the media player shuffle through a playlist of random TV shows, is this possible?

Thanks for everyones help, i appreciate it

1) It does not sound like you are using Linksheets in manor that will work correctly. Are you sure you are using linksheets and not XML files that are calling your backdrops? For linksheets, you save them in the root of your theme folder. Since you say you are using Black Mamba, (the linksheet version is called “Goodbye Black Mamba”), they would be put in the directory:

HUB:.wd_tv\theme\Goodbye Black Mamba Theme"video_name.extension"

They will not be saved there automaticaly by thumbgen (unless you do a lot of modification to the default output path) You have to rename the jpgs to the same extension as your video (.mkv, .avi etc) and put them there manually. There are a lot of threads and information on this board on how to use linksheets and the theme comes with a manual called “Link Sheet Manual - Black Mamba.pdf” that will explain everything you need to do to make them work. If you are speaking of the folder icons or movie covers, the jpgs go in the same directory as the video itself, and they do take longer to populate from a remote drive if it has spun down into a sleep state and needs to be “woken” when you browse the movies on that share.

2) You shoud be able to do this by using the media library for network shares. It will add remote drive to your media library and you should be able to see them aggregated from various locations without having to change you drive connections.  

3) I have not done this, but a search of the board for “video playlist” will provide you with some options, including external apps to create video playlists and a queue mechanism. I don’t believe this is random but perhaps someone else can chime in on this one.

Good Luck

-P

hey pearl thanks for the reply man

1 - im positive im not using any XML. Everything is working, I generated the movie sheets, renamed the same as the movie file and cut and pasted them into the theme root folder. I just noticed that when you go into .wd_tv then thumb folder i have no copies of the movie thumbs and sheets like i do for all my TV shows, which is on the local drive. I know thumbgen has a button you can click on that says fix for network shares?? havent tried that out yet but that might do the trick… i really dont want to regenerate all the movie sheets again though, that took most of all day yesterday. 3TB of movies will do that I guess.

2 - oh really! well this is good news. i assume media library for network shares is an option in the settings some where?? I also don’t want to turn on the media library feature as it generates a bunch of useless XML and slows down my wdtv constantly with its updating. So i hope the two features are not synonymous.

Yup Sword7, you are correct about running the linksheets, I did not get that you had gone through the rename process and moved your sheets.

To be honest, I am not sure about the local thumbs in the .wt_tv\thumbs directory now that I look at the directory structure.  I have all my video on remote drives so I have been keeping the thumbs I generate in the same directory as the tv show or movie. I do see what you are talking about though as i have some of them for some music I have on that local drive and I have no idea how they got there. Hopefully someone else on the board can explain what automaticaly puts the jpgs in that folder. 

For the second part, unfortunatey it is part of the media library. I have not used it in a while but if I remember correctly you have to have the Media Library turned on and the go to 

SETUP / SYSTEM / MEDIA LIBRARY / MEDIA LIBRARY MANAGER…

At first I was loving using this because I could aggregate shares from multiple places. Eventualy I determined it was not worth using he media library for what I wanted to do, and have moved all my share points ot the same server to make life easier.

One Question: Why would you have to regenerate all your movie sheets again if they are working? Im with you on this one. It took me a coupple of weeks to gen them all up for my movies and tv shows, I would do anything to avoid starting from scratch again if I could.

Sorry, no good answers for you today

-P