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[SOLVED] How are movies stored on Hard drive??

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patch:

--- Quote from: CAD on June 12, 2010, 12:13:33 pm ---Thanks patch - so you create sub directories for each genre? or Disk per Genre?

--- End quote ---
I have no sub-directories for genre, just basic media type (high def movie, low def movie, TV show).


--- Quote from: CAD on June 12, 2010, 12:13:33 pm ---I am using scan /folders for changed paths to add new media.
How does this affect the database if you have swapped hard drives??

--- End quote ---
It work really well. Update file path mostly gets it right.
The exceptions being if a movie has same name as a TV episode or I have two copies of a movie
I both cases I add the movie with new movie master, after which update file path seams to work if required.
Actually I tried putting TV series in PVD  but have stopped as adding new episodes involved more work than I could see benefit.


--- Quote from: CAD on June 12, 2010, 12:13:33 pm ---So it makes no difference to the systems that I use, whether they are laid out in flat format or sub-directories.
But it matters to my brain when I look at the folders and I see a flat format.
So I wonder if there are any advantages to putting them into sub-directories? (apart from appeasing my brain)  :) or leaving them in flat format.

--- End quote ---
I leave it flat as I can as it simplifies my life.
The only advantage of having sub directories on the file server is if you may want to copy or move a group of files to another location.
I do however have a directory for each movie as some of my movies use more than one file (sub titles, disc 1,2, etc), so all movies get a sub directory (I like uniformity).
I do give TV series a directory structure as they come in series which are conveniently selected as a group at times.
I use ..."TV Series/"<series name>/s<series number>/ files.


--- Quote from: CAD on June 12, 2010, 12:13:33 pm ---When disk is full - put in a new disk. How does this affect adding and removing movies from PVD?

--- End quote ---
If I can move a directory to another disk I do.
When a directory fills a disk I start another on a new disk (eg "Movie HD 2")

buah:
I rely on IDs. As you can see in picture attached, I adopted a convention in folder naming:
[ID]. [Title] - [Original Title] [(Year)] [[Source]], so it can match IMDb naming convention and PVD regexs.

All other manipulations are let to PVD. I adopted PVD Title formatting similar to folder naming: %N. %T (%Y) (see picture attached). After picking a movie in PVD by genre, or whatever other criteria, I find a movie stored on a HDD by its ID.

Every HDD should have its label, i.e. "4235-5715", meaning movies with those IDs are stored on it.

[attachment deleted by admin]

patch:

--- Quote from: buah on June 13, 2010, 01:05:29 pm ---I rely on IDs. As you can see in picture attached, I adopted a convention in folder naming:
[ID]. [Title] - [Original Title] [(Year)] [[Source]], so it can match IMDb naming convention and PVD regexs.

All other manipulations are let to PVD. I adopted PVD Title formatting similar to folder naming: %N. %T (%Y) (see picture attached). After picking a movie in PVD by genre, or whatever other criteria, I find a movie stored on a HDD by its ID.

Every HDD should have its label, i.e. "4235-5715", meaning movies with those IDs are stored on it.

--- End quote ---
Interesting
I hide the data you display most predominately (PVD id). I thought PVD just uses the file name when scanning for changed paths. I was in favor of appending the imdb id to the folder name but that would have to wait till PVD could do it for me.

I play movies by clicking on the play button in PVD. It then uses the recorded path to find the movie for me.

Movie folders are mostly named [Title] [(Year)] but I get slack at times as I know I'm rarely going to access the movie directly via this method.

Hard disks do have top level directories identifying what is contained within them (eg "Video - HD 2" or "Video - TV Series")

buah:
I set up PVD to automatically assign next highest ID which has to be identical to a folder's name ID. Folder IDs are not recognized by PVD, but they serve to sort order of movies (folders) in Regex scanner to be processed. Processing folders scanned this way, PVD ID=Folder ID is achieved.

I still do not play movies from PVD, because I earlier set up certain playlists ("American & Europian Classics", "Contemporary Asian", etc...). I tried once to play a movie by playing its playlist, but PVD purged playlist and played that movie. Till today I didn't exam this option enough to use it, although I intend to.

rick.ca:

--- Quote from: patch on June 12, 2010, 06:27:26 am ---So I use a simple and unambiguous initial classification on my hard disk
--- End quote ---

I think this is the most important consideration. Media on a HDD should only need to be classified according the method by which it's added/handled/managed. If what you might consider two different media types are added to the collection by using exactly the same work flow, then classifying them differently just makes for unnecessary work and increases the chance of error. For most people, the handling of movies and series are different enough it makes sense to store them in different folders. Same for home video, and maybe some would want downloaded media kept separate from ripped. In other words, use the simplest scheme necessary for your work flow circumstances, and otherwise let PVD (and whatever other software you might want to use) handle the database aspects of managing the collection.

This doesn't really add anything to the idea of keeping it simple, but most certainly avoid any ambiguity. I don't see any value in organizing media by genre. Movies usually belong to more than one genre, so it's ambiguous no matter what you do. Even if you create your own scheme where each movie only belongs to one genre, you're not always going to know which one a movie belongs to until after you've added it to the HDD and the database and downloaded the meta data (which, presumably, includes the genre).

If you really want the media to be somehow classified in the file system—perhaps so you can relate to it better when using a file manager—I would advise putting this off until PVD has the ability to rename file pathnames from the database (e.g., \Movies\[Classification]\[Title] ([Year].[Ext] ). Using such a facility would allow you to maintain such a file structure so it's perfectly consistent with the meta recorded in the database (e.g., if it's [class] movie, you could be sure to find it in your [class] folder).

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