Window 7 Libraries Feature

pzam

25-09-2010 15:36:14

I was wondering if anyone has tried this and what it might be useful for.

It looks like it can take the info from several drives and make it look like 1 drive in a folder view.

Then you could just aim tv-rename to that library folder.

I am wondering how it would handle removable drives also.

Thanks ..

ScoopD

28-09-2010 21:25:31

Libraries are good for reading stuff - as you say, several locations appears as one. They are not good for writing stuff - anything copied or pasted into the library will not go to any of the several folders that you may have collected, it will go to your user profile (the default location) unless you manually do it.
Haven't really got the hang of them yet - don't know if they were in Vista as I went from XP to 7 like most of the planet will.

pzam

13-10-2010 01:05:22

Before changing to windows 7 I had a chance to use a trial version of it to see how it worked.

I had 4 computers set up on a lan and some usb drives

one computer is xp set up with multiple drives shared
one computer is vista 64 bit set up with multiple drives shared
one computer is vista 32 bit running xbmc connected to tv via hdmc
one computer is windows 64 bit window 7 with usb drives and multiple drives.

The windows 7 was set up to take advantage of the library feature and make shares from it. I was able to take drives from 3 machines and usb drives and make them look like 1 directory in a share. Its not 100 percent perfect but was fast and very enjoyable to use. So far I have renamed dragged and dropped files, cut copied and moved on the library shares and every thing seems to be working well. It is looking like it might be a nice solution to make windows 7 into the media machine. I really did not care for its menus for daily use and will stay with vista for my regular work. Xp works nice for data storage computer if you can install it slim enough using remote pc so you can control it from other computer.
I even learned to use the remote shutdown to power down the computers from one computer.

I set up library's pointing to drives on all machines and the usb drives
I set up several types of library's like documents, video, sound each shared
I was able to access them with the xbmc machine play videos. There was some delay loading some things off the drives as they had to wake up now and then.

It work by using windows search and indexing all the drives. So windows desktop search has to be on each machine. The indexing needs to complete before you can really use it also.
When it is done you can make changes to the drives from the shares but if you are changing a file across a LAN don't expect undo to work. Be careful what you do. If you really must make 2 sets of shares (2 users) one read only and one that you can change and password it.

The thing I am looking at now is file name standards. It seems to be

Name (year) [note] cd{1-n} or disk{1-n}.language { -fanart -cover } . EXTension