[bertrand]

And I think it would be great to have the possibilty to just find the disk with the relevant movie or series or song on.

Well, you can "get" the disk by looking at the media info for the movie/song/show and check its path. This is what I currently do.

You could also look into solutions like unRAID... it is my plan, only blocked by financial aspects

[larionlarion]

I need a bigger system to hold all my discs, and it would really be expensive i guess 15 bays is nowhere near enough. I'd need two or maybe 3 15 bay servers.
Well ive just have to do it like you say and check info. But id really like a prompt if id try to play it. Would have been sweet, but we'll just have to work with what we got.
Either way it's the best way to go for media, no doubt.

[budo]

Well, you can "get" the disk by looking at the media info for the movie/song/show and check its path. This is what I currently do.

Actually it's the way I'm doing this too! Moreover I bought 1TB harddisk and dedicated it for all multimedia stuff that I use with XBMC, so I don't have the problem of removable media... except for my DVD collection that I can't see inthe Video Library... what a pitty!
I really would like to dig into the code and create a patch... but it's really impossible for me now! ... because of time...

[UncleAlex72]

I've created a patch for offline video media that prompts a user to retry/cancel if the connected disk cannot be found. See ticket #8563.

Also worth looking at are tickets #8538 and #8374.

[ezechiel1917]

Interesting, 3 similar patches lately for same feature, what's the difference?

[UncleAlex72]

The descriptions of the tickets are:

#8563: This patch gives support for video libraries split over many removable hard drives by prompting to retry/cancel (a la floppy disks of yesteryear) if a file is not found and thus allowing the user to re-attach the drive.

#8538: Patch to check the existance of items and sets the "unavailable" property if not found. Useful to mark items in disconnected usb disks or nas. See this thread for more info:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=65811

The patch modifies ThumbLoader to also check for this in the background. After that a message is send to the GUI to update the list (and hide offline items if necessary).

Also a patch for confluence skin as a "proof of concept".


#8374: This feature is needed in order to manage an "offline" archive.

If you have a number of dvds with movies, and want to add to your archive these movies, with this patch XBMC will store the disk label together with the movie data, and when trying to playback the movie, if the disk label is different, it will ask user to insert correct disk.
Information is also available to skinners, in order to give complete information to the user.

Basically, 3 different solutions to roughly the same requirement.

[bertrand]

These patches really look good.

I'll give them a try as soon as possible. When asking for insertion (patch #1), is any info regarding the missing "disk" displayed ? If yes, how is this information fetched ? From the item's path ?

[UncleAlex72]

These patches really look good.

I'll give them a try as soon as possible. When asking for insertion (patch #1), is any info regarding the missing "disk" displayed ? If yes, how is this information fetched ? From the item's path ?

Yes, it's from the item's path. There is an assumption that a given disk will be mounted with a given path (or drive allocation). This is certainly what happens in Ubuntu for disks with labels (I have no idea in other OSes). From a cursory glance, patch #8374 makes the opposite assumption that all removable media will be mounted in the same place.

[bertrand]

In my case, all my external hard drives use a path formated like this:

smb://host/STORAGE/EXT/EXT<number>/...

It would be quite convenient if you could establish, even through an XML file, some sort of mapping from a part of the path to a user friendly name. What do you think ?

[Harry Muscle]

I guess none of those patches ever really got anywhere ... so I though I'd pitch an idea of what I could code and see if you guys like it.

From reading this thread it sounds like the biggest thing people want is some sort of prompt to insert/attach the correct media when trying to play a file that happens to be offline.

What I can do is expand on the current dialog that simply asks if you would like to remove the item from the library if it's unavailable/offline. Instead it would mention that "The file you are trying to play is unavailable", list the full path to the file (to give you an idea of where the original file was), wait for you to make the file online (ie: plug in the drive) and then give you the option to play it, cancel the dialog box, remove it from the library, or to update the path (in case the drive get's mounted in a different location).

Please let me know what you guys think of this idea and if you want it coded?

Thanks,
Harry

[ezechiel1917]

I guess none of those patches ever really got anywhere ... so I though I'd pitch an idea of what I could code and see if you guys like it.

From reading this thread it sounds like the biggest thing people want is some sort of prompt to insert/attach the correct media when trying to play a file that happens to be offline.

What I can do is expand on the current dialog that simply asks if you would like to remove the item from the library if it's unavailable/offline. Instead it would mention that "The file you are trying to play is unavailable", list the full path to the file (to give you an idea of where the original file was), wait for you to make the file online (ie: plug in the drive) and then give you the option to play it, cancel the dialog box, remove it from the library, or to update the path (in case the drive get's mounted in a different location).

Please let me know what you guys think of this idea and if you want it coded?

Thanks,
Harry

Sounds reasonable, only I would imagine having a separate confirmation dialogue for remove from library option.
e.g. First window with info that file is unavailable, it's path and buttons Retry / Remove / Cancel .
Retry is pretty obvious after you insert/turn on valid media source and hit the button it will try to play it again.
Remove will bring a new confirmation window, that's because I'd like to be able avoid deleted item from library just because of potential accidental misclick.
Cancel ... no need to explain this.

[Harry Muscle]

I guess none of those patches ever really got anywhere ... so I though I'd pitch an idea of what I could code and see if you guys like it.

From reading this thread it sounds like the biggest thing people want is some sort of prompt to insert/attach the correct media when trying to play a file that happens to be offline.

What I can do is expand on the current dialog that simply asks if you would like to remove the item from the library if it's unavailable/offline. Instead it would mention that "The file you are trying to play is unavailable", list the full path to the file (to give you an idea of where the original file was), wait for you to make the file online (ie: plug in the drive) and then give you the option to play it, cancel the dialog box, remove it from the library, or to update the path (in case the drive get's mounted in a different location).

Please let me know what you guys think of this idea and if you want it coded?

Thanks,
Harry

It seems there is one patch that did get somewhere ... it's here: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=80147 Look very promising, especially since its all done and tested, just basically waiting for approval. I guess I'll hold off on doing anything related to this then.

Thanks,
Harry

[Ironman1965]

I store my media on 3.5" sata drives that I hot swap in and out of 2 esata drive docs. I've found this to be the simplest easiest most cost effective solution for managing a large continuously growing media library. Meedios is the front end I use now but it doesn't have the polish I'd like to see on screen. Could you implement a option feature in XBMC that references the drive label to the media and if the media is not existent on the system then it prompts for the drive labeled X, at which point you remove the current drive insert drive X windows loads the drive and movie plays. I've implemented this in Meedios and it works real well. This also saves unnecessary wear on the drives as they are not plugged in when not in use.

[tanglin]

I have all my movies and TV series on a networked share in my home, and travel for work sometimes. Because of that I have XBMC on my laptop, and have a folder which I copy titles into from the network. Then I need to rescan, and if I am online the titles get the internet information uploaded etc., then I am ready to go.

It would be nice not to have to do this manually. I would like to configure the same network shares I have on my main XBMC system on my laptop, browse all titles and locally be able to select an option to make a title available offline, i.e. the title would be copied into a local folder on my PC.

I would then be able to still browse my library, and play the cached title, even when I am on the road.

When I clear the offline requirement for the title, it could simply be deleted from the local file store.

As an extension to this, I can see this being useful in rooms in my house which do not have good network reception (and cannot be wired), but do have some. The titles could be cached on a local system and this would prevent buffering interuptions.

Anyone think this might be a valid requirement? I did search...

(And IANAP so I could not just code this good idea myself )

[RXP91]

I've got an idea to use a SATA dock and multiple hard-drives to store my movie library. I see no point in having 10tb of space constantly up when I just mostly watch TV shows, so I'm dismantling my file server and keeping only 2tb of space constantly available.

My idea is to have all my movies on my old drives but not plugged into anything. Then I browse them in XBMC and when I want to play one it'll tell me to "insert disk X" and play. Is there any plugin available to do this?

Thanks for any advice guys.