Hey guys!
I just finished building my new, dedicated HTPC to run XBMC on my home theater system, and I'm just getting things going this weekend.
My main question was about organizing all my media. I currently have it spread out across several computers on my network and several NAS devices. I bought a new, dedicated 3TB NAS drive to get started, and I'd like to get all my movies and tv shows on that drive for exclusive use by my HTPC.
Anyone know of some good tools that will help me gather up and move all the content? I've noticed a lot of tools that are good for getting fan art and to rename files, but nothing for shuffling media around the network to get it all to land on one drive. I'd rather not have to do it by hand, because it's a LOT of stuff. Most of the files are organized properly on their respective computers, but it's still several places to manually move things from, making sure to not grab things like the the RAR files from when they were downloaded, for example.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Bob
Looks like a manual job; not sure what O/S you're using... TeraCopy is great for win machines.
rsync is good, it means you can stop and resume if the rest of the household get sick of you rogering the network with your bulk moving.
Sorry....I didn't mention my OS because I have an iMac with Bootcamp...so I can do both. Whichever has the best tool, I'll just switch to that OS.
PatK...you really think it's a manual job? I'm surprised no one has ever asked for this. You would think that one of these media manager software packages would have this feature. After you're done finding all the information, move everything to this one master folder. Dunno....guess I thought it would be a lot more straight forward than it is.
Bob, how do you plan to organize your files on your new 3TB NAS? Specifically what file and directory naming standard do you plan to use and what sort of XBMC install are you planning (multiple front ends and a database & TV server)?
Simply moving files from one NAS to another may be pointless as XBMC can reference multiple sources where media is stored and present the media in one nice interface as if they were all located on one device
If your planning on retiring you older NAS then that's another issue
Oh, and if you plan to rip your BluRay collection, then 3TB is not very big at all
PS: i should have also mentioned i'm new to the HTPC world and found XBMC rather nice (only a few warts)
I currently separate my sources into a "BD" directory containing my BluRay movies, a "DVD" directory containing my DVD movies and a "TV shows" directories containing sub directories each containing a DVD series. I store this structure on a USB HDD and when one USB drive fills up, i simply connect another USB HDD and reuse the same naming convention for the sources on this new drive. In this way, it's simple to add these new sources to XBMC which then presents them nicely in a unified way. I'm hoping such a method will make it very simple to move the contents when planned HDD replacement needs to occur, either to a bigger USB/ESATA HDD or a nice big NAS/server. That's my hope anyway.
Note that i manually rip all my disks to .mkv files using the naming standard of "title (year).mkv" (for feature films) and "title series#episode# - episode title.mkv" (for series) and check all subtitle streams are set appropriately within the .mkv file which has been rather time consuming but by placing the video in the appropriate directories and specifying the source type, scraping works well. I then export the library in case, for some reason, i loose my database and have to re-scrape (which can be a problem via wireless broadband where i live). I hope this process also means i should then be able to recover a working database without needing net access...
Not sure if this is reasonable way to set up XBMC but files are located in known places and few places and easily backed up
The naming of files on disk is very important to get XBMC to scrape everything correctly into it's database.
I suggest you start by reading the blurb of text on this wiki page:
Adding_videos_to_the_library (wiki) and after that learn how you should name your video files to get them scraped successfully:
Video_library/Naming_files (wiki)
(2013-07-15, 09:37)skylarking Wrote: [ -> ]Bob, how do you plan to organize your files on your new 3TB NAS? Specifically what file and directory naming standard do you plan to use and what sort of XBMC install are you planning (multiple front ends and a database & TV server)?
Simply moving files from one NAS to another may be pointless as XBMC can reference multiple sources where media is stored and present the media in one nice interface as if they were all located on one device If your planning on retiring you older NAS then that's another issue
Oh, and if you plan to rip your BluRay collection, then 3TB is not very big at all
Well, I'm going to try to use a pretty standard naming convention with the title, year, and format. Most of my moves already have this, and renaming the others shouldn't be too much trouble. I'm basically doing this to consolidate everything so I can have a NAS for work, and one for backup. Basically just making each drive have a single task instead of having it haphazardly strewn about the network.
Also, I'm not really planning to rip my BD disks right now. Maybe down the road, and even if I do, I wouldn't be ripping them at full size anyway. Don't really see the point in having 25GB files for each movie.
But really, it's the gathering and moving of files I'd like to automate. Any thoughts on that? I've started doing it manually...but I really get annoyed when it tells me that things are going to take 5-9 hours depending on how much I'm moving. LOL
I am not sure how you think that automation would take less time, if it takes 5 hours to move a block of files it takes 5 hours.
Set all the shifting up one evening and go to bed.
Bob, i may have to reevaluate saving my rips at the BD native 20-30GB as my eyesight is not getting any better as i get older and grumpier
If you want to automate this task you can always learn to write a windows powershell script or unix script, whatever is appropriate to your OS.
I wouldn't worry about automating this if it's a one off as this is more work than simply setting up the shifting using explorer and going to bed as nickr said
