Topic: Best Practice: HD Contents library in disk

[toys4geeks]

<< Draft : Best Practice: HD Contents library in disk>>
Hi PDVD,

NMTs / HDPs(Hard disk Players) are awesome right?

Unless you delete your fave movies after watching, chances are,like me,  you end up keeping them  several disks over time of varying disk capacities.

Given 10GB file/move, The next best way from dumping it to a NAS is to dump them into a 2TB.

I share to hopefully spare you from the pitfalls of deduplicating folders and set order to the chaos associated in a disk

a. Ensure each movie is stored in a folder ( along with the nfo and about/cover jpgs and srts)
b. in cmd, cd to the target drive and type:
  dir /ad /b   
above will show you a list on screen.

if you want to put to a text file, then :
dir /ad /b >> 2TBDISK001.txt

where 2TB is my disk capacity
where DISK001 is my disk numbering convention
where ZZZ is your 3 letter abbreviation for the categories (MOV Movies, MOVSER= Movie Series, )
at this time you may also want to label your disk to 2TBDISK001, just for consistency

Once you have done a and b. for all your disk, you may need to decide how to categorize them.
From my 1st NMT supplier, I inherited the grouping like so:

MOVIES
MOVIES SERIES
ANIMATION
XXX
TV SERIES
DOCUMENTARIES
SPORTS
DEMO


Above will enable you to move around files and deduplicate contents. but keep in mind it is best to move them in the same disk and keep the folder names consistent for ease in sorting them.




Some  cool tools you can use to start taming your HD library and manage your contents per disk.

http://directory-size-download.com/
http://www.moleskinsoft.com/ file finder (checks for duplicates)

[lncc63]

About time someone put up this topic.  I would have started it but I've yet to find a set of practices that I'm really happy with.  

One thing I can contribute is to recommend the program: Media Center Master (MCM) which has been helping me a lot in organizing and maintaining our library.  MCM is actually a "scraper" program.  A scraper's primary function is to gather metadata about content in the library.  Metadata are stuff like the cast, genre, rating, images, etc.  Most NMTs I imagine have this function, maybe not as extensive or sophisticated as MCM, but this is not why I recommend it actually.
 
In addition to scrapping, MCM also has several functions that are very useful.  The one I like most is that it renames all my files and folders to the convention I chose whenever it successfully determines that the content particularly is.   This way the directories and files as they appear in our NMTs are all properly named and thus sort predictably.  I used the convention <NAME> (<YEAR>).   It does this both for movies and TV series.

Let me warn everyone though that the program is not as polished as other programs.  Please check it out to see what I mean.  There is a free version and shareware version.  IMHO, it does perform its core function exceptionally well, so well in fact that I paid for a license.

[toys4geeks]

@lncc63
Thanks for sharing.
 I really like the naming convention thing of MCM, will try it tonight coz i had to transpose YEAR with 1080p/720p manually, i guess i'm just lazy to look but i think this would help me a lot!

@PDVD members,
keep them flowing...

When the dust settles maybe we can have a community convention coz I am sure, like the other people in this NMT forum, you have occasional quips such as: "yaiks --  i did not know had that movie in my N-th disk but i ticked it for copy anyway coz i wasnt sure ... sayang"

[ultramanxp]

Eto saken:

to rename - theRenamer
to scrape - ember
to watch - htpc + xbmc