Best way to utilise media library

Software WD Utilities
1

I have a NAS connected to my WD, the share that I connect is writable by the WD. I turned on media library and it started writing all these .xml and .metathumb files to my share. This clutters everything up somewhat. When I browse the share now on other devices there are tonnes of files that are irrelevant.

I tried something different and put each movie into it’s own folder, so the little files would all be in the folder too. Instead of 1 file per movie, I would now have 1 folder per movie. This fixed that problem, however when browsing movies in the mode where you can see plot etc on the screen as you scroll, you don’t see this now, you just see an image and you have to click in to the folder to see the rest of the stuff. Defeats the purpose of media library, may as well not use it.

Does anyone have a solution for this? Do you all just put up with the extra files everywhere?

1 other question, which I think is a bug I found. I name my movies with the year on there, in cases like Italian Job or Death at a Funeral, there are multiple versions so year is required to make the name unique. Quite often this will stuff up the media library scanner. Every time I try and lookup the info from flixster manually and type the movie name in, it doesn’t work. It just tells me to choose from a list of irrelevant movies that aren’t even like what i typed in. It will always show the last item successfully scanned. I’ve tried typing in gibberish or even something I know it can find, still just shows the last found item.

2

Hi

Agree with you, I have all my files in Individual folder, much neater.

Unfortunately WDTV does not show info ( xml ) for folders.

So I used / created a playlist ( .m3u ) with all my movies, each line have the relative path to the movie.

My movies are on a directly connected USB hard drive, but don’t see why the same principle could not work for NAS

If you want you can make playlist for different Genera – if you have your own home movies for example

It works well.

I name all my movies in the form “movie name ( 2010 ).mp4” say, also the folder is the same name, had no problem.

3

When you choose ‘movies’ on the home screen go up to ‘sort and filter content’ and change the filter from ‘folders’ to ‘all’. This works for me. I also have movies in their own individual folders.

4

Awesome, thanks guys. Will try the .m3u file tomorrow. I don’t think the “all content” will work, as I browse by folders. I have an “incoming” folder with stuff I am yet to watch or want to watch soon, which has like 50 things in it, vs about 300 things if I was to show everything.

Any thoughts on the media scan / lookup problem?

5

The m3u approach seems a lot of manual work to me if you have to update it every time you add movies but whatever works for you :slight_smile:

6

I would simply write a cron job to generate the m3u file quite regularly. Maybe every 5 minutes.

cd /path/to/movies && find . -iname ‘*.(avi,mp4,mkv)’ > movies.m3u

7

tony0204 wrote:

Unfortunately WDTV does not show info ( xml ) for folders.

Actually it will if you name your directories appropriately.  I have .xml files that I created for each TV series (by starting with an xml file for one episode).  The directories for each show are named like Show.mkv with the associated xml being Show.xml (e.g., Chuck.mkv and Chuck.xml).  Inside the Show.mkv directory are season (sub)directories or just episodes (along with their .xml files).  Note that not all fields are displayed for directory xml’s, but title and description work fine.