Hello all, I finally bit the bullet and took the time out to register with the community. I have been a long time user of computer based media centers and have both the original WDTV (3 years) and Hub Version (1 year).
I along with a number of people out here decided to go with this solution because it behaves as an appliance. Don’t have to worry about the HDMI resolution settings, TV’s as secondary monitors, etc etc. As a media player it functions very well. As a hub for media…from a user sitting in front of the hub connected TV…not so sure.
Specifically, I have copied my favourite videos along with other media to the drive. I went through the painstaking process of individually downloading content information to each video (about 300) to create a user friendly environment for viewing videos I deem worth watching in my cave in the basement. Problem is…I thought the genre listing would be useful to sort the videos for quickly navigating to a particular title, but only one genre is listed. I understand that this is a limitation of the device after perusing the forums and net. Well then…how about a workaround…using my own rating system to deem which videos quickly should be viewed…you know based on how good I personally thought a movie was.
Well this in theory was great…I loved the blue stars rating the video…even better. When I turn on the box I see a list of movies I love if sorted by star ratings in descending order…pumps a guy up to watch a movie. Problem is…it seems the box randomly loses the star ratings. I have entered ratings on 4 occasions over the past week and each time sometime during the next hour or so…all the star ratings are removed or deleted. I understand that some problems with the library are solved by simply pressing the power button and doing various types of refreshes, but this particular issues has me baffled.
I would love both the Genre (multiple genres associated with individual videos) and the rating system working and bullet proof, but at this point would be satisfied with either working 100%. You know some easy (user friendly way) of sorting content other than blindly “next paging” or “right arrowing” to death. Certainly this method will kill my remote buttons much sooner than later…lol
FYI - I have tried using playlist generator and created a compatible playlist which will select certain files, but after a little thought about long term management of the solution…it seemed to quickly diverge from the purpose of buying the box in the first place (user friendly experience). I am sure there are those of you who could wax eloquent about the ways you can trick the box, but I was wondering if anyone also had any idea as to how from a user perspective we can negotiate using the sorting, filtering and ratings tool provided to provide a repeatable and dependable method for accessing information on this device.
All comments welcome…ahh feels good to finally throw it out there to a community that cares and feels my pain.
Until the Hub begins actually IMPORTING the XML (instead of just displaying its data) into the Media Library, the Genre filter isn’t helpful, as you’ve already learned.
I’m hopeful WD will address that at some point in the future, but have no idea when (or if…)
The Star Ratings and WATCHED status don’t appear to be saved in the same database. I have no idea what causes those two things to be forgotten…
Thank you for the speedy response. As a significant contributor to the community I take your words as gospel with respect to the metadata for the videos.
Do you have any feedback or intel regarding the loss of ratings or watched status information?
Then let me pose the question this way…What is the best way to organize around 300 movies on the hub and then what is the best way to access these movies?
Well, probably the best way with the current way the HUB operates, is to organize your movies by Genre folders. So that you’ll have your movies something like this:
If there is a wrong way to initially do something I will invariably find it. So as the case with how to store the video on the drive, I did just that.
I have the videos stored in that exact way on my Nas…exception…I also added an unorgainzed folder…to house videos yet to be manually “genre-lized” (can I claim that word as my own?).
When I copied the files over to my XBMC mediacenter…I found it not to care about folder structure, now with the shortcomings of the WDTV Hub the method you described would work well enough to limit how many movies you had to thumb through to get to a desired selection in a genre. All who have not copied numerous video over yet heed the warning. For me…this solution is too late since it means I would have to move/copy these files to numerous new folders and anyone who has used this files system for an hour or two will attest to the fact that although straightforward…file / folder copying moving and deleting is a time consuming process on this baby.
Don’t get me wrong…I may not abandon this unit for everyone else, but may revert back to the XBMC for all its android, apple, pc, file managment goodness for my own pesonal mancave media consumption. I don’t want to, but ladies/gents help me stay on the path of righteousness. Oh, I prefer not to hack the firmware etc…
Well, yes the HUB would be better if you could organize the same way that you do with a HTPC. But it is what it is and it does what it does.
However, moving your files doesn’t take that long to do. Yes it can take some time to move files from the PC to your HUB, but moving the files from one folder on the HUB’s internal drive to another folder only takes a second to do. It’s not the same as having to move the files over the network and you can cut and paste multiple files from one place on the internal drive to another place in just a matter of moments.
The thing that takes the longest is creating your folders and the finding the files you want to move.
I didn’t realize that. Thank you again for the relevant and timely feedback. I will give this thread a few days to grow then likely start the process.
Oh if anyone else is in the same boat, I believe opening the hub folder on your pc and then the movie genre folder on the nas and doing a window content compare for each open window will identify content from each of the nas genre folders that are common. This would simply re-identification of the genres. You could then move the contents to the appropriate folder using a pc.
