Recently bought one of these players. Quite impressed so far. It was a toss up between this and the AC Ryan Plaoy On but the WD shop was closer, product has a better warranty and the user intefrace seems OK now (which seemed to be a problem before).
Anyway, all that aside, just wondering if there are any suggestions with regard to file naming for movies etc. I’m contemplating either just the name and year or a longer title including:
Name, year, format, audio etc.
If choosing the latter, does it need to be in a specific format (e.g. punctuation wise)? I ask because I’ve borrowed a friend’s external HDD and with all his movies every word is separated by a full stop (period). Is this because the WD Hub needs that? Or maybe it’s how he downloaded them?? A site convention maybe?? So (and this is just a random example), could a file name be:
Kingdom of Heaven 2007 Blue Ray Dolby Digital
or something like
Kingdom of Heaven _2007_Blue Ray_Dolby Digital (which I think might look / work better)
or even
Kingdom.of.Heaven.2007.Blue.Ray.Dolby.Digital
In any event I suspect some form of rename from the file download / copy (e.g. from legit DVD) would need to be renamed to keep some form of standard and commonality to avoid a messy library.
Finally, where, if you want to do it, do you assign the thumbnails and / or any film info / metadata. I’ve seen the suggested use of the following folders so assume that’s where you’d do it. Just need to work out how?
how about tv shows? i find thumbgen is not able to do the lookup and i always have to type the name into the popup box… and the popup box always default to the toplevel foldername or to the drive letter… so annoying.
Hmmm. Thanks. I guess just the name will be OK. I suppose the date could always be added if essential as part of the title:
e.g. ‘War of the Worlds 1958.mkv’ or even ‘War of the Worlds (1958).mkv’ to distinguish an earlier version from a remake (which in this case could be called ‘Dakota Fanning Screaming for 2 Hours.mkv’).
Must admit I always hate the ‘underscore’ naming of files when I see it on Windows files, irritates the **bleep** out of me for some reason.
Noted re Blu-Ray. Can’t say I’ve ever noticed, then I never bought many Blu-Ray discs, never really thought they were worth the premium. I’m probably not enough of a Video/Audiophile
Something else I noticed, I may have misread this, or may just not have got my head round it yet. I THOUGHT I saw a suggestion to have several folders per movie:
Root
MOVIES (Folder)
Goldfinger (Folder)
Movie File (Folder) containing the movie
Thumbnails (Folder) containing the .jpg file (s)
Info (Folder) containing (I think) the meta data stuff
When displaying the movies by folder though (accept there may be a better way to look / view the titles (still going through it all) it looks a right mess.
What seems to work better is:
Root
MOVIES (Folder)
Goldfinger (Folder)
Goldfinger.mp4 (movie file in whatever format)
Goldfinger.jpg (the thumbnail)
That way the movie shows up as the Movie name in folder view with the jpg as the folder cover (albeit it has the green icon in botttom right hand corner of the jpg image).
Not sure if there is a better way to organise it all??
Actually, the best way to have you file structure is to have the least amount of folders possible, and to sort them by Genre rather than have each movie in it’s own individual folder.
So if you want to sort your movies by Standard def & Blu-ray (this is how I have mine), you would start off by having a Standard def folder & a Blu-ray folder. By the way, who ever named it Blu-ray probably did so because they couldn’t spell, since the name is derived from the blue-violet laser used to read Blu-ray discs. :smileyvery-happy:
Anyway, so after you start with those 2 folders you can add you structure like this.
Action (folder)
movie1.mkv
movie1.xml
movie1.jpg
movie2.mkv
movie2.xml
movie2.jpg
etc.
Comedy (folder)
movie1.mkv
movie1.xml
movie1.jpg
movie2.mkv
movie2.xml
movie2.jpg
etc.
You will find that this is the best and easiest way to display you movies.
I might skip the Movie per folder. Not sure it achieves much, just thought it may HAVE to be like that because of ‘cover art’ where, for all my music on a NAS, each cover is called folder.jpg so each CD has to be in a seperate folder. I found out by trial and error that the movie itself needs to be named and the jpg needs the same name e.g.:
Goldfinger.mkv
Goldfinger.jpg (not Movie.jpg which is how it COULD be read from the manual, maybe avtual movie name examples would be better).
All that said, I like the idea of Genre folders within a root Movie folder. Not sure about splitting Blu-Ray and HD for my needs. Is there anything I’m missing by not doing that (e.g. later down the line). I like the idea of the root Movie folder seeing as I might add another folder of whatever to the 2TB external drive (may go either My Book, Elements (but hard to find here in Malaysia) or Passport (but not keen on the non powered USB connection)).
@ Joey: Thanks for the link to that thread. Wil have a read through later. Just one thing, the ‘Before’ and ‘After’ examples in the first post are empty, no pics?
Anyway, I’ll read some more and have a play with just 2-3 movies before I start to dabble in a full collection.
Which a search for “folder structure” would have pulled up. So since it is tiring answering the same question over and over and to save time I just use “movie1” and assume that anyone seeing that would know that it was a substitute for their file name.
I have searched many times and come up with various solutions. Apologies if I didn’t immediately conclude that your solutiion was the best option. I thought forums were partly there to clarify things, maybe I’ve got it wrong.
I was referring to the WD Live MANUAL when I commented about the naming of movies. Hence I wrote “(not Movie.jpg which is how it COULD be read from the manual , maybe actual movie name examples would be better)”. Having a jpg. merely named folder.jpg is the CORRECT convention for most music applications so each album MUST be in it’s own folder. Not beyond the realms of possibility that this COULD have been the case for movies, PARTICULARY when the manual examples are worded the way they are! I also get tired at times of people commenting on what they THINK i write rather than taking time to READ IT!!!
Still getting my head around what the .xml and movie sheet files do.
On another front, is there way to select an icon for the folders with different names (e.g. TV Series, Movies etc) rather than having it just select the first JPG from a movie it comes across. I suppose one way is to have a jpg in called 1.jpg or a.jpg?
Still getting my head around what the .xml and movie sheet files do.
On another front, is there way to select an icon for the folders with different names (e.g. TV Series, Movies etc) rather than having it just select the first JPG from a movie it comes across. I suppose one way is to have a jpg in called 1.jpg or a.jpg?
yes you just make sure each folder has a folder.jpg in it… i found sometimes the HUB is weird so i also have a the same image but names !folder.jpg just so it see this before the other images.
I know when i first got the hub i was hoping for some amazing file organisation and sorting but in the end i had to work with the limitation of the HUB and the great advice form others in here than have already been through it.
So now i have MEDIA LIBRABY turned off and have a Movies folder, with Action, SCI-FI, Comedy, Thriller etc subfolders.
the only problem i have is deciding which folder a FILM should go into…
Also with Media Library turned on… your TV Shows will be sorted by the TITLE inside the XML so all the episodes will be out of order… (unless you set your titles to be 01 - Episode title… etc)
Thanks. Working on the same basis of my NAS music folders I gathered ‘folder.jpg’ might work. Try as might it’s just not showing up?? Oddly it’s INSISTING on using the first .jpg which is actually a movie name. Really odd? I’ve tried re-booting, I’ve tried “Folder” and “folder” no joy??? Even checked the file is true jpg. I’ll try some more.
Having messed some more it’s really odd??? I have two movies in the folder at the moment with 2 jpgs, named the same as each movie. Sooooooooooo. As it kept selecting the first movie jpg, not the ‘folder’ jpg I deleted the two movie jpgs and did a hard power off, forcing a re-scan. Even without the jpgs there each movie has it’s own jpg and it’s still using the image from the first movie as the folder icon??? Now I’m confused??? Something to do with turning library off???
Messing more I found I could turn off the TV Live, turn it back on, no changes, edit the folders on the Macbook, eject the WD TV, no changes. Only when I edited the folder name did it switch to ‘Compiling Library’ which then brought up the revised look (e.g. new folder name, correct image etc). I’ll have another llok and see if there is a ‘force media compilation’ option under settings which I can use to update it in future. Either that or try turning Library off???
yeah i feel your pain… the hub is annoying when it decides on a image to use.
My work around so far… is first to change to a different view… then delete the hidden \hub \ .wd_tv \ thumb folder.
Then try clearing the media library (through setting) and finally a FULL REBOOT… (power button + 5seconds)
thats usually forces it to rebuild the thumbs.
It not an exact science. so yeah it can be very annoying… i do wish WD had some sub option to let us override the folder images (IT CHOOSES FOR US).
Well if you’re just working in the Drama folder and changing things in there the only folder/files you need to delete in the hidden folder are the ones for it. Then power down, I prefer just holding the power button on the remote control instead of pulling plugs or using the one on the Hub itself as it has it’s own history of going bad from use. This way you don’t have to rebuild ALL the folders and stuff inside the hidden folder, just the one you are working in. But the big key here, IMHO, is to power it off as soon as you can after deleting the thumb folder so it doesn’t get a chance to rebuild.
For this I use “Zeeb” file renamer free utility (search it in google). It automatically detects the files (you can add your own file types in the settings). You can rename a file with different options. In my case i renamed movies like “Die hard.IMDB #.Action.avi” (I dont remmber the exact syntax it may be <imdb#>). You have option like first genre or you can have all genre listed under IMDB for that movie. I use first Genre option to rename my movies. Once i rename all movies in the format then i can search for “action” then cut them and paste it in “Action” movie folder. Zeeb is great tool for renaming your movies. You can also use “FileBot” to rename your files.
