Seeing all movies on all drives

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live & Live Plus
1

Is there a way to get all my movies with thumbnails to show up. If I go to media shares I can see them but no thumbnails. When I go to network shares I see each separate hard drive I have the thumbnails which is hard to alphabetize when you are always adding titles. ASpreciate any advise

Terry

2

You can make a playlist for all your files on various drives and folders.  Use Playlist Creator.

Then when you go to net shares just view this playlist – it will show all the thumbnails for the movies and you can select the ones you want by pressing play on them (now, it *will* try and play the next movie when the first one is finished, but you can easily stop that process).

3

Is this creator a part of the WD live or do I need a program? Would I then need to alpabetize them or would they alphabetize automatically? Thanks for the response

Terry

4

http://www.oddgravity.de/app-opc.php

Playlist Creator 

5

Thanks for the link. Easy to make playlist but I cant figure why thumbnails dont show?  Do I have to rebuild wd folder? Thanks Jerry

6

Let’s walk this through – you made your playlist of videos, correct?  And in each drive and folder those videos reside in you have JPG images for each video with the exact same name (case sensitive) as the video files?  And your thumbnails are all 70K or less?   And when you display the playlist you don’t see any thumbnails for the files?

If all four of those things are true, then you’ll need to describe to me a sample drive/folder structure (including where your playlist is stored) and walk me through exactly (and I mean each menu press and what it displays) what you are doing on the Live so we can find out what’s wrong.

7

Thanks Mike

made a Playlist sample of 5 movies

JPG labeled folder for each movie. not labeled the same as movie title  {thumbnails do show in main movie folder, just not on playlist)

Will have to check each size of the jpg;s not sure i8f all the same

HD

Movies

folder for each movie

movie file,.jpc labeled folder

Using netshares

 Have no issues at all just trying different ways to brose movie files

8

Got to go to work will try later Thanks for the help

9

There are TWO kinds of THUMBNAILS, Folder Thumbs and File thumbs.

If you have a movie called My Movie, and you store it in its OWN FOLDER, then you will need these:

|  My Movie    (folder)

\ 

|\ 

| - My Movie.mkv

| - folder.jpg

| - My Movie.jpg

The folder.jpg will be the thumb for the FOLDER, and My Movie.jpg will be the thumb for the MOVIE.

10

Yup, Tony should have you straightened out now.

11

Thanks Mike and Tony I havn’t messed with this yet tonight but thanks for the help. One question…If I add a folder.jpg and a movietitle.jpg won’t it show  2 thumbnails when the playlist loads?

12

I don’t store my movies in folders like this so I can’t say – I suspect you’ll be able to tell US when you try it, but my hunch is that it won’t because on a “normal” playlist what the Live does is seek the thumb that matches the file in the playlist, and that file will be the movie name (NOT folder.jpg).  Indeed, if true it kind of begs the question as to why have folder jpgs at all.

13

Well I used folder.jpg because they show up under netshares thumbnails. I’m trying the playlist  to save a step to make it easier for the family to play a movie

14

Thanks Tony … That worked now I have to copy and rename all the folders Thanks again

15

I am working with this creator but the problem I have is that I cannot seem to get the files in a folder I mean I already have the folder laid out on my harddrive Folder which is the name of movie inside that I have a video_ts folder and my thumbnail folder that is named folder so WD will show it. When I go to playlist creator and try to do the folder it won’t let me but if I go to the Video_ts folder then it puts all the files from that folder into the creator list. So I don’t get how I can get each separate movie on the playlist without having a whole bunch and I mean a whole bunch of bup and vob files. What am I doing wrong and I hope I explained it good enough

Thanks

Terry

16

 I was able to make a bit of headway I am not sure it was the right way. First I will start with my layout seems like that is what you need Mike to really help Hardrive/movie folder/ video ts- folder .jpg/ then past that is a bunch of vob ifo bup files. Ok what I did was go into those files found the one that was VTS_01_1 .vob this perticular movie had 4 of those with the last number being _2 _3 _4. I renamed the first VOB file the VTS_01_1 to the title of the movie went to playlist seem to play fine I did not play whole movie however. I took a copy of the folder jpg which is the thumbnail for the folder put into the same movie folder along with the folder jpg but I named it exatly like the movie title I made from the video Ts folder. Result was no thumbnail in playlist just the named VOB file. I then took the Movie jpg and put it inside the Video Ts folder with the  renamed vob file and still have no thunmbnail in the playlist. They are named exactly the same but one is a jpg and one a vob. Hope this helps

Thanks Terry

17

tm224 wrote:

I renamed the first VOB file the VTS_01_1 to the title of the movie went to playlist seem to play fine I did not play whole movie however.

Well, duh! What do you expect if you break the expected file naming scheme? If you wanna go with playlists it appears you’ll have to convert those VOBs to ISO to get meaningful names in them.

18

tm224 wrote:

 I was able to make a bit of headway I am not sure it was the right way. First I will start with my layout seems like that is what you need Mike to really help Hardrive/movie folder/ video ts- folder .jpg/ then past that is a bunch of vob ifo bup files. Ok what I did was go into those files found the one that was VTS_01_1 .vob this perticular movie had 4 of those with the last number being _2 _3 _4. I renamed the first VOB file the VTS_01_1 to the title of the movie went to playlist seem to play fine I did not play whole movie however. I took a copy of the folder jpg which is the thumbnail for the folder put into the same movie folder along with the folder jpg but I named it exatly like the movie title I made from the video Ts folder. Result was no thumbnail in playlist just the named VOB file. I then took the Movie jpg and put it inside the Video Ts folder with the  renamed vob file and still have no thunmbnail in the playlist. They are named exactly the same but one is a jpg and one a vob. Hope this helps

 

Thanks Terry

Terry,

Playlists aren’t going to work well with VOB structures because you need to play the proper VOB file to start the movie and Playlists are really designed to work with a single, named video file.  You can’t rename your files, so your playlist would consist of a bunch of identically named files (however, the thumbnails would be unique).

Ideally you would convert your DVDs into MKVs or ISOs in order for a playlist to work properly.

19

Ok Mike so what you are saying is that more than likely by me renaming the one VOB that probably only a portion of the movie will play even though when I don’t rename them you can click on any of the 4 and it starts the movie from beginning. So could you please give me a correct folder layout if I was to go to an ISO file lets say the movie title or ISO title will be Dawn Patrol. Second could I take the already VOB or video ts folder and convert them without the dvd to an ISO?

Thanks

Terry

20

If you make ISO files you can put them all in the same folder (although I have separate folders like Action, Comedy, Sci-Fi, etc.)  It’s just a single file that plays.  So the title might be Dawn_Patrol.ISO and your thumbnail would be Dawn_Patrol.JPG.  That’s all.

It depends on what software you have and how you ripped the DVDs in the first place as to whether you can convert them to ISO.  If you ripped the DVD as a regular folder structure (i.e. the way they are on disc) then you can use a wide variety of programs to create an ISO out of them (I only use AnyDVD HD so I can’t speak for anything else).