We use WDTV solely to manage/view movies stored on a WD Passport. No other uses, no apps (smart TV has all we want already), it isn’t connected to the internet, we don’t need to stream anything. Very simple and straightforward use.
I’ve only been able to achieve half of what we want to end up with however, which is to be able as well to play some things from a second external drive that has separate folders for 3D movies, Animated movies, Documentaries, TV programmes/series, Sport, and music-based material such as Ballet, Opera, Shows etc.
When I attach the second drive to WDTV it automatically rebuilds the “Videos” library and attempts to download artwork etc. The result is a content display that is a seriously messed-up jumble with 2D and 3D films indistinguishable, with documentaries, various TV series and individual episodes, animations, comedy, sport and all the rest.
But that’s exactly what we don’t want.
There’s not as many of these others as there are films, and it is no problem to choose them just from their file names. So we don’t need artwork etc … “Dr Who S07 E03” is enough, so is “CMA Awards 2014”, “Sleeping Beauty, Matthew Bourne”, “Avatar 3D”, “2012 Olympics” etc.
Before WDTV, both drives were usb’d to the TV all the time and the “Others” drive showed as a folder-tree same as Windows almost immediately and it took only seconds to drill down to what we wanted to watch.
It was great to switch to WDTV for the films however, and have them available to play in just a few moments rather than the 20-30 mins the TV took just to index content before we could select/play something, and I have been trying to see how to do that for the “Others” as well but separate from the Videos section perhaps and with no changes to it?
So can someone more expert comment on whether this is possible? I would like to have both drives connected to the WDTV but handled in such a way that the “others” is not added to the library display of film artwork/detail in WDTV’s “Videos” section, but is still accessible for playing, possibly via some other selection/criterion? A simple list of folders/files is fine.
I know it is probably possible to just let the “Videos” section import everything anyway and then spend time dealing with all the artwork for some of those “others”. But some like sport and music vids won’t have artwork anyway, and then there’s a need to make sure that things are tagged in a recognisable way as I assume we would then need to sort by category in order that we could actually home in on something we want to watch whether film, TV, sport or whatever.
But frankly that’s way too much fuss especially as we won’t see 65 again, and if what we want to achieve can’t be done painlessly we’ll just leave the “other” drive usb’d to the TV anyway and simply go on navigiating its folder-structure that way to get to what we want to watch off it.
But a 1-box arrangement and one less remote to juggle is much preferred!
Hopefully I am just missing what I need to find in the instructions, however I have tried to figure something out so many times now that I can’t think of any new ground … maybe I am actually wanting something that can’t be done anyway?
Any guidance would be much appreciated, thanks!
