Two media folders to one file folder

[Taomyn 0]

Is it possible to have two media folders set up, one as "Home movies" and one as "Photos" that use the same file folder for mixed content? Said folder will also have subfolders to be included.

 

Maybe my installation is borked but when I tried this, the first media folder was set to type "Home Movies" pointing at my file folder and seemed to be ok showing me all the video content. I then added a new media folder set as type "Photos", added the same file folder as before but it only ever contains Shows as containing videos and the content is exactly the same the other one. The scan took less than a second for several thousand images so I don't think it did anything and refreshes don 't change this.

 

What is even weirder or plain makes no sense to me, is if I delete the two media folders and recreate either, the content magically comes back as if the "delete" didn't actually do much. Again it takes less than a second to scan the folder contents. Is this expected behaviour?

 

Is there a simple way to reset the databases etc without having to completely uninstall the product?

[ebr 16184]

No, I do not imagine that will work out very well.  We used to validate against doing that but maybe we don't anymore.

 

We identify items by their full path.  So, if you pointed to the same exact location and cause two different types of items to be created with the same physical paths there is no telling what might happen.

 

What you could maybe do is setup another folder with a shortcut in it to the original folder and point your second media folder to that.  I haven't tested this but it might work for what you are trying to do.

[Taomyn 0]

Ok, understood.

 

But that doesn't explain why when I delete both media folders in MB and then add either of them back, that everything instantly comes back. Is the database not properly purged, or is it a problem that I'm seeing? Do I have to reinstall MB to trash all the data?

[ebr 16184]

We never actually delete items from the database because we can't be sure they aren't referenced elsewhere and we want to be able to bring them right back if the issue was just that a location wasn't available temporarily anyway.  So, that is working by design.

[Taomyn 0]

Ok, so how do I purge it anyway? No matter what I do now I cannot get MB to see the photos in this folder, and I'm not going to mess about with shortcuts/symlinks or a structure that my main HTPC running OpenELEC is perfectly fine with, just to get around what seems to me to be a flawed concept. If you say I can't reference the same item in two separate MB media folders, then why would you be worried that deleting an entry in the database would be referenced anywhere else? Isn't that a contradiction unless I misunderstand you.

 

Yes you need to worry about a location temporarily disappearing is if it's the main root/designated folder, and then of course I would not expect MB to simply forget about it, but if I actually remove it myself from MB then surely that's me telling it to forget all about it. There's a difference -  ask for a confirmation if you want. Anything disappearing below the main folder I would always expect to be deleted permanently, if only to stop the database expanding forever.

[ebr 16184]

We do allow you to reference the same item from two different places.  In the early days we didn't but we do now.  The problem you have is that you referenced the same item twice in such a way that made it get identified as something different for each reference and that is simply something we had never tested and has now bungled up your data.

 

Your only solution may be to re-build the data by simply deleting the library.db and re-starting and let the scan run.

[Taomyn 0]

Your only solution may be to re-build the data by simply deleting the library.db and re-starting and let the scan run.

 

Thanks, that's what I have done and it seems to be rescanning again......now I need to figure out how to set up MD to manage my mixed video/photo folders. There's several hundred thousand files so I'm not going to restructure it.

[ebr 16184]

The Photos folder type will also recognize loose videos so I would use that.