How should your hard drive be arranged for files?

Hi, I’m new to this device, I’m getting ready to go buy the WD TV Live Plus Media Player, one question. I have a external hard drive with several hundred movies located under a Movie folder and each movie is located within a folder with the name of the movie (All my movies and AVI and some MP4) Same with my Pictures and Music, is this format OK or do I need to arrange in to some kind of order?

It all depends what works for you… the box itself doesn’t really care how you organize it.

However, having several hundred all in one folder might make finding the one you’re looking for a bit of a pain… you might want to add some sub-folders to categorize things a bit.

Good Idea, I have movies seperate from TV Shows, I guess I could seperate by drama, comedy, Western…ect.

Ya, as I say, it’s somewhat of a personal preference thing.  Some people group by year (or by decade)… some people group alphabetically… some people group by genre… some people just leave them all in one big folder.

You can always try a few different ways and see what you like best.  Although, I’d recommend connecting the USB drive to your PC for reorganizing the files – I’m personally not a big fan of the WDTV file tools.

Yea, I thought about putting them in some kind of order on the PC first, maybe arrange them so many in each folder, maybe all movies from A - E in one then F- J in one and K - O in another, well, you see where I’m going with this. Then keep all TV shows in a separate folder. All my Pictures are in different folder and sub-folders, easy to read. Just need to do the same with my music.

Heres how I do it and so far I am very happy. First I use the iso format because you can create a playlist from these files and attach thumbnails to them. I chose to go with 1 TB hard drives attached to a NAS. Currently I have 6 of them plus the one that came with the NAS. The reason for this is that if I ever lose a hardrive it is only 200 movies instead of thousands currently seeting up an offsite Mirror drive. Anyhow for every Hardrive I create a name example DVDs then in that I create a folder for every movie with the title name Example folder named Flicka then inside that I put the iso file that is also named Flicka along with a folder .jpg and a Flicka .jpg and then I copy and paste what the movie is about with paint and put that in as untitled .jpg. this way its like reading the back of a dvd case. Next I use playlist creator and all my movie files in one playlist so when I click on all movies playlist all of my movie thumbnails are there all I have to do at that point is choose a movie and click on it walla it starts playing. From That point you can create several playlist ie genres actors, mini series whatever you would like.