I had only a 6TB My Book Live Duo, I currently added a 4TB Seagate USB external to it to expand storage capacity. The Duo sets it up as a seperate share and I have added it to my Media library. All is working but when I only had one share in my media library I could change the view from “All files” to “Folders” which worked great because I keep 3D movies and TV shows in seperate folders with all my regular movies in the root of the folder being shared.
Just to make it as clear as possible
\share\videos\3d\moviename.files
\share\videos\tvshows\tvshowname\
\share\videos\movename.files
So it would show the folders for 3d movies and tv shows at the very top and then continue with my movies. Now my second share I have added movies to it and they are in their own folder seperate from the rest. So when I first start it shows just two folders which is the root of each share. When I do all files, they do mix in, but then I have scroll through 10s and 10s of episodes that are basically cluttering the movies.
How can I get these two shares on the media player to show efficiently together? Any ideas, advice, or solutions?
Ok never mind I did some research(hours) and I found the below. Looks like I will have to SSH into My Book Live duo and try this symlink stuff. Will be looking for help from that forum. I will come back and update with how I did incase someone ends up searching for this kind of solution.
Just noticed this request, so here is what I have set up...
I was unwilling to let our SMPs write to the drives containing the video files, as I didn't want to ever have to deal with corruption of one or more 3 TB drives. So for quite a while I simply browsed the (SMB) share folders. However, once we got to having multiple drives, each with Movies and TV subdirectories, I started searching for some way to merge them. While web searching this I came across suggestion to use symbolic links, and I realized that that would also allow setting up a separate writable share, so I could finally use the Media Library.
So here is the setup (on a Linux server running Samba for sharing):
-- Each external drive containing the video files gets mounted like /Video1, with subdirectories Movies, TV, etc.
-- The /Videon directories are each shared out so that I can browse them as shares (if desired), but they are readonly
-- I created a new directory, /Video, on the internal drive of the Linux server, and made subdirectories Movies, TV, etc.
-- Symlinks are created in /Video/Movies to each video file in /Video1/Movies, /Video2/Movies, etc.
-- Symlinks are created in /Video/TV to each video file in /Video1/TV, etc., and so forth.
-- /Video/Movies is shared out as Movies, /Video/TV as TV, and these shares are writable
-- Media Library is enabled, the writable Movies and TV shares are added to it
-- The SMPs are used to get content, writing all metadata (e.g., .xml files) in the /Video directory only
The key to making this work is that Samba can be setup to serve the target file of a symlink rather than the symlink. This requires the following lines be in the smb.conf file (given my setup):
unix extensions = no [global section]
follow symlinks = yes [share section]
wide links = yes [share section]
Works just as I wanted: (1) can use ML without danger of video drives being touched, and (2) Movies and TV from multiple video drives end up merged into single shares.
Obviously creating all the symlinks by hand would be annoying with more than a few files, so I wrote a simple shell script that adds any missing symlinks; I just run this script anytime I add video files to the video drives, so trivial to keep up to date. Oh, yes, one complication was subdirectories under TV. They have to be recreated in the merged share (can't be symlinks). Not a big problem when using a script.
With 6 TB of video files, /Video requires < 1 GB for all the metadata and backdrops, etc.
Reproducing this sort of setup on an NAS will require that you be able to create symlinks from one NAS directory to another, and that you be able to set the appropriate Samba options (which will probably require editing a config file). I frankly don't know how easy it is to do such things on a typical NAS.
