Hi, I'm a newb. Just struggling with this one.
I use xbmc on a PC - Windows XP.
I have 5 external hard drives. 2 have movies, 2 TV and one music.
Only 2 of these drives can be plugged into my machine at once.
Can I have one movies folder within xbmc which stores the movies from multiple hard drives - even if one of them is not connected to my computer?
Do I need to create two movie folders within xmbc - Movies1 and Movies2 which relate to the two movie hard drives I have?
Same question applies to my two TV drives.
Thanks
Why don't you buy a usb hub?
Windows Home Server can pool the drives into one storage area.... no need for multiple folders... personally I'd take the drives outa the enclosures and use them internally with something like WHS or FreeNAS...
Thanks for the replies. I'm not going to take my drives apart to be honest.
Hub would be good but I just don't want to have all drives connected at once - they're not always in the same place - that's why I bought portable USB drives in the first place. Often they are with friends and family.
So, can anyone answer my questions?
You can add multiple movie locations, spread across several hdd's, just add each movie folder then set content to movie, and they all get pooled into the movies on XBMC, and if a film is on a drive that's not connected, it will still show, but wont play, obviously. Just dont "clean" the library without all the drives attached, as it will delete all the movies that are not available at the time.
Same for TV obviously.
I currently have 4 drives with content on them all, all external, but soon to be put into a home server rig (if i can find a donor pc to use)
Also note that if your on linux name the drives differently! otherwise they'll fight over which is named what.
i.e. if your Drive A is not named anything and plugged in it will be called "disk", if you plug in Drive B without a name it will be called "disk2". Hence if you reverse the order of plug in the names will also be reversed. We plan to mount based on unique id's but it doesn't make the mount point human readable, not a big problem but have been a reason for not doing it.
Cheers,
Tobias
Your question sounds a lot like my own setup: an always-on drive in my own workstation, that acts as the NAS hub (whatever that means :p), and 6 external hard drives plugged in either using USB or eSATA.
Regarding the "NAS" server, it is my dumb Win7 workstation. In order to avoid wasting efforts mapping each drive to a fix letter, they're all mounted to an EXT folder on one of the drives: X:/EXT/HDEXT-1/, X:/EXT/HDEXT-2, etc. These settings are stored on NTFS level and will even survive a new install.
The EXT folder is shared at root level. Other shares exist for the persistent TV Shows and Movies shares that are not on removable drives.
On XBMC, I mainly have 4 sources:
- Movies: online
- Movies: offline
- TV Shows: online
- TV Shows: offline
The online ones just have one entry: the native Movies / TV Shows share on the fixed hard drive.
The offline entries have one entry per disk, like:
smb://NAS/EXT/HDEXT-1/Movies
smb://NAS/EXT/HDEXT-2/Movies
smb://NAS/EXT/HDEXT-3/Movies
Once the offline ones have been indexed, I have set the category not to include these sources when scanning for updates.
It has worked fine for a while now, but it will still be replaced with an UnRAID server when I have the financial resources.
Hope it helps.
willyontour Wrote:Thanks for the replies. I'm not going to take my drives apart to be honest.
Hub would be good but I just don't want to have all drives connected at once - they're not always in the same place - that's why I bought portable USB drives in the first place. Often they are with friends and family.
So, can anyone answer my questions?
You need to create sources for each drive. If the drive is not plugged in, the media from that source will not appear in the library.
theophile Wrote:You need to create sources for each drive. If the drive is not plugged in, the media from that source will not appear in the library.
Wrong. He can use the same source for all his removable drives (see my setup).
AFAIK, the current XBMC version doesn't handle offline stuff. Items on removed drives will be visible, but XBMC will offer to remove them if you try to read them.
There are patches that implement some offline file handling. See
this thread,
this thread and
this ticket.