I have been experimenting with different configurations of usb drives and Ethernet drives. I am now trying a sort of non raid raid setup using a 4 drive raid controller in non raid mode on a old machine.
I am trying to find a nice way to have lots of drives online but only have them power on 1 at a time as needed. I am using a old 386 550 MHz with 128 Meg ram that does not emit much heat.
One problem is after getting so many drives if remembering what is where or havening a checklist of what you have referenced or are still needing to reference.
Tv rename is ok for looking for things but if you change drives around or unplug and move drive letters its data is worthless. It has so many bugs on searching for file names that make it crash that need fixed also. If the programmer just took a list of all the names on the tv guide and added them to a folder and tried to search for them he would see the bug. It will also change your season and episode numbers to ones that have nothing to do some shows and on occasion change the name of the show to another show. I suspect that the database it uses gets bad data entered causing this. create a sample database for all the shows and run the program on it and see what it does.
sstteevvee
12-06-2009 18:23:16
If you have multiple drives, try making sure that either SMART power management is on, and/or your OS can spin them down after inactivity, then the OS/drives should automatically spin up and down as needed. You can set the power saving settings to be fairly aggressive, e.g. a 5 minute timeout.
If you're running a *nix flavour OS, then I think there is a filesystem type that'll merge the contents across a number of drives so that they all appear merged, or at least share a folder of symlinks to the different drives. In Windows, you can mount drives onto folders of another drive, if the folders are on a NTFS filesystem. Vista supports symbolic links, but I don't know how they'll be presented over a fileshare.
Regarding bugs scanning for stuff, etc.. As I've mentioned several times before, I need specific examples and step-by-step instructions on how to reproduce the problems. Vague bug reports that are hard to understand (and yes, I allow leeway given that not everyone speaks English natively) will get less of my time and attention. This is a program that I wrote for myself and a few friends, and me adding any features or fixing bugs outside those that affect us are only due to my good nature.
That rant aside.. The folder monitor seems to work better than you suggest it does for me. Fresh TVRename install, from entering a folder name, hiting "Check" then "Full Auto" gives:
..which involves a number of searches on thetvdb to get the show codes since I had no local TheTVDB data. After that, "Done" transfers them all into "My Shows" without crashing.
One of my longer term things to do is have paths specified relative to a "Media Root Folder" that is defined elsewhere, meaning that if you move your media from "s:\this" to "w:\that", then it's each to change eveything. For now, editing the TVRenameSettings.xml file directly may be the easiest. I'd be surprised if other programs can cope with arbitrary rearrangements of drives and folders, unless it fills every folder it finds with metadata.
The errors seem to crop up now and then it is like someone changed data in tvdb and it makes your program change season and episode numbers. if you happen to be adding a lots of shows you may not notice it when it happens. I feel it should not make drastic changes to the numbers in the line.
0205 can be s02e05 02x05 205 but it should not change it to 04e03 or some other number depending on wrong data.
sstteevvee
16-06-2009 00:07:31
TVRename will never change the season and episode number of a file (it might add more in if you've set up a merged episode).
If people add or remove episode in TheTVDB, then the names of your files will change, but the numbers won't. I don't do things like: " E03 Gamma became E04 Gamma because an episode was inserted, so we'll rename the file E03 to E04." If a file has the wrong season or episode number, it has to be manually changed by the user.
If TheTVDB has season one as:
E01 - Alpha
E02 - Beta
E03 - Gamma
your files will be named:
S01E01 - Alpha
S01E02 - Beta
S01E03 - Gamma
..then TheTVDB is changed to:
E01 - Alpha
E02 - Beta
E03 - New Episode
E04 - Gamma
..your files will then be renamed:
S01E01 - Alpha
S01E02 - Beta
S01E03 - New episode (this is the file that was called Gamma before)
S01E04 - Gamma
If that episode was mistakenly added to TheTVDB, then when it it removed TVRename will put the names back to the way they were before.
If a particular series keeps getting changed back and forwards a lot, you could post to the TheTVDB forums, and ask them to lock the series (and show them a good source of correct information), so it doesn't keep getting messed around with.