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I recently maxed out the internal hard drive in my xbmc system, mostly with tv shows. I decided that the easiest solution was to archive older shows and older seasons of some of my current shows to an external hard drive. I would like to still be able to watch these shows from time to time, but don't want to leave the external drive connected and turned on all the time. So I first moved some of my older shows that have been cancelled. I simply moved the entire show directories to the external drive, cleaned the library, and added the external drive as a new source. Xbmc searches for new content, and all my shows pop back into place, but in their new locations. As long as I never clean the library without the external drive connected, I think I'll be fine.

Then I run into problems archiving old seasons of current shows. I have some shows like CSI and CSI:NY that have been around eleven and seven seasons respectively and I just don't need all of those "live". No problem I think, I'll just move the bulk of the old seasons to the external drive and only keep the past season or two on the internal drive. The only problem is, I can't figure out how to get xbmc to merge multiple seasons of the same show from two sources. I went through the same process of cleaning the database, making sure xbmc still sees the external drive as a tv show source, and tried to do get xbmc to grab the old seasons content. No luck at all. Can anyone help me figure out if it's possible to do this, and if it is, where I've gone wrong?

*** External drive ***

External:/CSI.NY/CSI.NY.S01E01.avi
...
External:/CSI.NY/CSI.NY.S01E23.avi
External:/CSI.NY/CSI.NY.S02E01.avi
...
External:/CSI.NY/CSI.NY.S02E24.avi
Repeat this pattern for seasons 3-6

*** Internal drive ***

Internal:/CSI.NY/clearart.png
Internal::/CSI.NY/CSI.NY.S07E01.mkv
...
Internal:/CSI.NY/CSI.NY.S07E22.mkv
Internal:/CSI.NY/clearart.png
Internal:/CSI.NY/fanart.jpg
Internal:/CSI.NY/folder.jpg
Internal:/CSI.NY/logo.png
Internal:/CSI.NY/season01.tbn
Internal:/CSI.NY/season02.tbn
Internal:/CSI.NY/season03.tbn
Internal:/CSI.NY/season04.tbn
Internal:/CSI.NY/season05.tbn
Internal:/CSI.NY/season06.tbn
Internal:/CSI.NY/season07.tbn
Internal:/CSI.NY/tvshow.nfo

I left most of the infrastructure files on the internal drive thinking that it would make more sense for it to always have that information and then only grab the old episodes off the external drive when I connected it up and requested one of those old shows. Am I just trying to make this too complicated? Am I missing something obvious?

I just tried you idea and it didn't work either.

Weird thing is whilst it didn't appear in the library, it did appear in the "recently added" but without a thumb.

pseudo7 Wrote:I just tried you idea and it didn't work either.

Weird thing is whilst it didn't appear in the library, it did appear in the "recently added" but without a thumb.

Did you put a copy of the tvshow.nfo in the external hard drive as without it it would surely try to rescrape, but i would have thought it may then Show 2 tv series with the same name.
Have never seen this asked about before.
I myself only archive complete shows saves confusion.

pseudo7 Wrote:I just tried you idea and it didn't work either.

Weird thing is whilst it didn't appear in the library, it did appear in the "recently added" but without a thumb.

Thank you for the sanity check. At least if it turns out that I missed something, I'll be in good company.

Quote:Did you put a copy of the tvshow.nfo in the external hard drive as without it it would surely try to rescrape, but i would have thought it may then Show 2 tv series with the same name.
Have never seen this asked about before.
I myself only archive complete shows saves confusion.

I intentionally left it without an nfo because I wanted it to re-scrape the directory from the external drive to re-add the episodes. I also half expected to end up with two series with the same name as you mentioned. Instead I got nothing, just the seasons I left on the internal drive. I suppose I can always shuffle files around and only put cancelled shows on the external drive, but I'll probably poke at it a little bit more first and see if I can make it work.

My ones don't have any nfo's so i guess that rules it out slightly.

I was gonna play about a bit but haven't had time.
Perhaps you have to remove the show then scan it in or something. But it doe seem strange and your situation is understandable and appropriate.

As I mentioned in the other thread, I have a "good enough" solution that at least made the old seasons watchable. I looked around at the db schema and opened up the sqlite database to poke around. After making backups, I tried a few things to see how the front end responded. The best solution so far was to add entries to the tvshowlinkpath table. Apparently, the front end had discovered all of my directories on the external drive, it just somehow failed to find the episodes inside them. So I added an entry to the tvshowlinkpath table which basically associated the show with both directories. Then I went into the front end, browsed over to one of the shows (CSI NY in this case) and used the context menu to force it to scan for new content.

Shockingly enough, it worked. It suddenly started adding all of the episodes. Once it finished, I tested it by playing episodes from a number of seasons spanning both drives and they all played fine. Upon exiting back to the season view, I noticed that xbmc now shows 48 unwatched episodes in a season that only had 24 episodes. As expected, marking an episode as watched decrements the unwatched count by two, so it's doubled up somewhere. I attempted to clean the library, but that didn't change anything. I also tried some other skins thinking it might be a skin related issue, still no luck. I'm planning to delve back into the database later tonight to see if I can figure out whether it's a problem unique to my database or a side effect of the way the path handling is coded.

I also ran into some quirkiness with the season thumbs, but it was late and I wasn't paying as much attention, so that may have been a PICNIC problem. Either way, if those are my only two issues, I suppose I can live with them.

Interesting results.
Forgive me for saying this but would it not be easier and far less painfull to just
Move whole series to your external? As thats exactly the way i do things.

paul Wrote:Interesting results.
Forgive me for saying this but would it not be easier and far less painfull to just
Move whole series to your external? As thats exactly the way i do things.

No worries, I can't disagree with your point - it would certainly be easier and less painful. I just wanted to be able to leave the drive powered off most of the time and only have to turn it on when I actually wanted an old show or season. It's been my experience that external hard drives just don't last as long as their internal counterparts. I'm not sure if that's due to heat issues, jostling when they're moved around, or the fact that external hard drives aren't allowed to go to sleep very often. Why waste that lifetime spinning idly when I'm rarely using that drive?

Also, I suppose there's a bit of stubbornness involved. Somewhere along the way, I decided that it should work. It doesn't matter that it really doesn't work like I expected it to, I'm going to make it work!

Quote:As I mentioned in the other thread, I have a "good enough" solution that at least made the old seasons watchable. I looked around at the db schema and opened up the sqlite database to poke around. After making backups, I tried a few things to see how the front end responded. The best solution so far was to add entries to the tvshowlinkpath table. Apparently, the front end had discovered all of my directories on the external drive, it just somehow failed to find the episodes inside them. So I added an entry to the tvshowlinkpath table which basically associated the show with both directories. Then I went into the front end, browsed over to one of the shows (CSI NY in this case) and used the context menu to force it to scan for new content.

Of course, it's so simple(!)
I didn't try it.

Maybe worth post a ticket to see what the Devs think.