Storing your content

[robphelan]

I was wondering how people are storing their content.. specifically your movie library.

From my early days, I had created separate subfolders under D:\movies for action, comedy, drama, suspense, etc.. and manually moved movies into the appropriate folders.

However, XBMC doesn't care about subfolders and it's not easy to find the newest files in a system like this.

As for TV shows, Sickbeard automatically creates folders for each TV show to keep them properly organized, so I'll stick with that.

thanks in advance.

 

[Binky]

Media Center Master or Metabrowser can both automatically process movie folders to pull box covers and metadata. They also rename folders to a "Movie (year)" format.

Best practice for these is to keep separate movie folder with a subfolder for each movie, and a separate TV folder with subfolders for each TV show.

 

[Charlie98]

Best practice for these is to keep separate movie folder with a subfolder for each movie, and a separate TV folder with subfolders for each TV show.

That's what I do, but I have them divvied up in movie categories like Military/War, Classics (old stuff, ) Horror (vampire and zombie crap my wife and daughter like... ) etc... I also have my series' in a separate folder because it's so large I back it up on a separate drive.

 

[thestrangebrew1]

I pretty much have it like this:

Movies->Action
->Amazing Spiderman
->Amazing Spiderman.mp4
TV Shows->The Simpsons
->Season 1
->Episode 1.mp4 (or whatever)


Pretty basic folder structure.

 

[Claudius-07]

In XBMC you can easily find the "LATEST" as an option under the Movies header. You can even have the floating gadget that shows the newest top 10 type thingy. I still have all my content in directories like you, Action, Drama etc., but yah since all the folders get scanned and scrapped when my XBMC PC turns on, it really does not matter where you place it.

I have XBMC running the Library update automatically scanning my 4 drives which each contain my different movies. I still separate them more by habit than anything. There is also an addon that's called WATCHDOG which if you leave your XBMC on all the time, essentially does updates every time you add something to where you store all your content.

All my movies are under these folders, and are have the name of the movie in the same format that IMDB has it such as The Avengers (2012). So that is the title of the folder. then inside is the actual movie which I ripped and it's called The Avengers (2012) x264 DD5.1.mkv. That's it and next movie and so on and so on. As long as I follow that format, XBMC always finds new stuff and again i can easily see what new stuff I have simply by pressing down on the Movie title and hitting "latest" OR... like I said through the gadget which actually creates the top banner on top of Movies which shows the latest and you can scroll. You can add or modify these "gadget"s through the SKIN directory.

 

[Fallen Kell]

My ripped movies go into their own individual directory with the movie's name. These are also all stored in their own ripped movies directory (as opposed to recorded shows/movies). I use Media Portal which knows how to lookup IMDB data for the movies/shows such as screenshots, cover art, synopsis, categories, etc., so I don't need to bother with any of that in terms of storing the data on disk.

 

[pauldun170]

Movies\(title)_(year)\
TV Shows\(TV show)\Season (#)

Scraper takes care of the rest

 

[Oyeve]

4tb nas

 

[SheHateMe]

10TB Unraid Server.

 

[Golgatha]

Segregate movies, TV shows, music, and Bluray ISO files into different directories. Stored on a dedicated household server with 5.5TB worth of disc space in it. Syncs with my HTPC daily and I use external drives to provide off-site backups.

 

[WT]

One huge folder. Each movie gets its own folder and cover art. I use DVD Library Manager to fill in the cover art (it no longer works reliably due to Amazon blocking the metadata scrub so I do it manually) and WMC handles the frontend and playback. Its so simple my 6 y.o. can watch a movie with no help from me.

I have picked up enough TV series that I feel I should separate them from the movies, but so far I haven't been able to simplify it enough to make it a worthwhile endeavor.

As far as backups, I have a pair of 3TB HDs in the HTPC, one for DVDs and another for BDs. This is all backed up nightly to a WHS that offers 4.5TB of storage internally plus 1TB of external storage of the important stuff. I'm all about redundancy.

 

[SolMiester]

I was wondering how people are storing their content.. specifically your movie library.

From my early days, I had created separate subfolders under D:\movies for action, comedy, drama, suspense, etc.. and manually moved movies into the appropriate folders.

However, XBMC doesn't care about subfolders and it's not easy to find the newest files in a system like this.

As for TV shows, Sickbeard automatically creates folders for each TV show to keep them properly organized, so I'll stick with that.

thanks in advance.

I use Plex Media Server, it doesnt worry about folders either, however does have recently added and on desk....not too mention, it has filters for genre, years etc...

 

[Red Squirrel]

Alphabetical folders (A, B, C etc) and just dump the movies in there, in their own folder.

It works fine if I'm looking for a specific movie, but if I just want to browse and watch anything it's not as easy, to browse through each one. I usually just pick a letter at random, then see what's in that list and if there's anything I want to see I watch it, if not I pick another letter etc. Works ok I guess. I've been debating on canceling cable though, if I do that I'll probably make a separate folder for TV shows then do the same thing. In fact there's lot of TV shows I download anyway as I rather watch them in order.

Using XBMC and they are shared via NFS on my main server.

 

[gorcorps]

I don't sort my movies at all. My TV shows are organized like most people have already mentioned, but I don't do anything to my movies. Rip directly to the movie folder and I'm done.

 

[smitbret]

I put my media into sorted folders but use my DLNA software to filter and sort with playlists (Genre, Actors, Years, TV Series, etc.) that are generated from the metadated or file properties. Foldes just got too clunky after the library reached a certain size.

 

[$panky]

On my HTPC/server, I have a partition to hold and share all my media. E:/audiobooks , E:/music ect. Since this is the main repository and several users and devices must access it, the entire partition is set to read only file permissions. To allow additions to the library I have a recently added folder with the same subfolders(music , movies & TV ect) that anyone can write to. I then clean up the dir structure, transcode and add meta data before I add it to the main library.

My movie folder is E:/movies & tv/movies/*genre*/*moviename*/. I do this because many devices don't break movies into genre, and even if they do its not neccessarily the genre(s) I want.

I break the tv folder up into several folders also, to make navigation easier. Series, kids shows, sports, documentaries ect.

Everything in the library has metadata, so I use yamm to automaticlly scrape the movies in the recently added folder, then manually use media center master on the tv shows and to check the movies.

 

[DavidT99]

My server has a movies folder with individual subfolders for each movie. The XBMC library automatically sorts by year, genre, etc for me.

David

 

[pcunite]

Is everyone storing ISO files or what?

 

[$panky]

Is everyone storing ISO files or what?

I don't like iso at all. It takes up too much space and too many devices will not play it. I rip all my dvds to folder structure(video_TS folder) format then transcode them to mkvs- H264 at 1200kbps looks fine to me and uses about 1 GB per movie. Older movies in 1080p I will usually transcode to 720p at 2000kbps. Newer movies with high visual quality or alot of action I will use 720p at 4000kbps. I really can't tell much difference and the space savings and being able to play or transfer to other devices without HAVING to transcode is nice. I usually use ac3 5.1(Dolby Digital) at 364kbps on everything for the same reasons unless the bitrate on the disk is lower to start with.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I usually keep it in whatever format it was in when I downloaded. I have a couple that are ISO but most are mkv, avi and mp4.

 

[velillen]

All mine sits on a 19gb unraid server at the moment.

Movies
--->Ripped ISO (dvd's only)
--->HD rips (mkv's made with makemkv)
--->Downloaded (movies downloaded off the web)

TV Shows (done by sickbeard)
-->TV Show name/Season/episode


It all gets streamed to HTPC'S so playback is of little concern to me

 

[smitbret]

I don't like iso at all. It takes up too much space and too many devices will not play it. I rip all my dvds to folder structure(video_TS folder) format then transcode them to mkvs- H264 at 1200kbps looks fine to me and uses about 1 GB per movie. Older movies in 1080p I will usually transcode to 720p at 2000kbps. Newer movies with high visual quality or alot of action I will use 720p at 4000kbps. I really can't tell much difference and the space savings and being able to play or transfer to other devices without HAVING to transcode is nice. I usually use ac3 5.1(Dolby Digital) at 364kbps on everything for the same reasons unless the bitrate on the disk is lower to start with.

I'll keep .iso for certain Kids DVDs (Dora the Explorer, Little Einsteins, etc.) to make episode navigation easier, but other than that I rip for maximum compatibility across devices like $panky.

DVD TV Episodes and Movies get ripped at 950kbps with a 2 channel .aac track as the primary audio. I'll add a 2nd multi-channel .ac3 track that is passed through if available.

Older BR or for BR movies that I don't feel will benefit from 1080p get re encoded to 720p with a bitrate of 2500-3000mbps depending on content. Audio tracks are set the same as DVDs, passing through the .ac3 or converting the .dts to a 448kbps .ac3.

For Action and Epic type BR I re encode to 1080p .mkv at 8000mbps. The first audio track is still a 2 channel .aac that is set to Dolby Pro Logic II, 2 channel with a bitrate of 160kbps. Then I'll Passthru the DTS track for the 2nd audio channel.

 

[smitbret]

I don't like iso at all. It takes up too much space and too many devices will not play it. I rip all my dvds to folder structure(video_TS folder) format then transcode them to mkvs- H264 at 1200kbps looks fine to me and uses about 1 GB per movie. Older movies in 1080p I will usually transcode to 720p at 2000kbps. Newer movies with high visual quality or alot of action I will use 720p at 4000kbps. I really can't tell much difference and the space savings and being able to play or transfer to other devices without HAVING to transcode is nice. I usually use ac3 5.1(Dolby Digital) at 364kbps on everything for the same reasons unless the bitrate on the disk is lower to start with.

I'll keep .iso for certain Kids DVDs (Dora the Explorer, Little Einsteins, etc.) to make episode navigation easier, but other than that I rip for maximum compatibility across devices as $panky does. I agree, they are large, cumbersome and just don't play nice with tons of devices.

DVD TV Episodes and Movies get ripped at 950kbps (I think $panky meant 1200mbps) with a 2 channel .aac track as the primary audio. I'll add a 2nd multi-channel .ac3 track that is passed through if available.

Older BR or for BR movies that I don't feel will benefit from 1080p get re encoded to 720p with a bitrate of 2500-3000mbps depending on content. Audio tracks are set the same as DVDs, passing through the .ac3 or converting the .dts to a 448kbps .ac3.

For Action and Epic type BR I re encode to 1080p .mkv at 8000mbps. The first audio track is still a 2 channel .aac that is set to Dolby Pro Logic II, 2 channel with a bitrate of 160kbps. Then I'll Passthru the DTS track for the 2nd audio channel.

Disclaimer: These video bitrates are the minimum and I reserve the right to increase them as I see fit and I often do. I also use specific h264 settings for things like ref frames, b-frames, trellis, levels, etc.

 

[$panky]

I'll keep .iso for certain Kids DVDs (Dora the Explorer, Little Einsteins, etc.) to make episode navigation easier, but other than that I rip for maximum compatibility across devices as $panky does. I agree, they are large, cumbersome and just don't play nice with tons of devices.

DVD TV Episodes and Movies get ripped at 950kbps (I think $panky meant 1200mbps) with a 2 channel .aac track as the primary audio. I'll add a 2nd multi-channel .ac3 track that is passed through if available.

Older BR or for BR movies that I don't feel will benefit from 1080p get re encoded to 720p with a bitrate of 2500-3000mbps depending on content. Audio tracks are set the same as DVDs, passing through the .ac3 or converting the .dts to a 448kbps .ac3.

For Action and Epic type BR I re encode to 1080p .mkv at 8000mbps. The first audio track is still a 2 channel .aac that is set to Dolby Pro Logic II, 2 channel with a bitrate of 160kbps. Then I'll Passthru the DTS track for the 2nd audio channel.

Disclaimer: These video bitrates are the minimum and I reserve the right to increase them as I see fit and I often do. I also use specific h264 settings for things like ref frames, b-frames, trellis, levels, etc.

You made me think for a minute! No it's kilobits per sec. If you used 3000 megabits per second on your HD videos that would be 3 gigabits per second. (you couldn't stream them over your 1 gigabit connection ) Anyway I find 1.2mbps for dvd's and 2-4 mbps for 720p to suffice for most things. I'm curious why you leave the stereo track in though? I haven't ran into anything that won't play the 5.1.

 

[smitbret]

You made me think for a minute! No it's kilobits per sec. If you used 3000 megabits per second on your HD videos that would be 3 gigabits per second. (you couldn't stream them over your 1 gigabit connection ) Anyway I find 1.2mbps for dvd's and 2-4 mbps for 720p to suffice for most things. I'm curious why you leave the stereo track in though? I haven't ran into anything that won't play the 5.1.

Whoops, you're right. My bad. I really must have been having one of those moments.

I use the 2 channel because many devices (old iPod, Xbox 360, etc.) require the first audio track to be 2 channel .aac in an .mp4 container or it will fail to playback. If you're streaming with Plex or DLNA, the software will often take care of that conversion, but I prefer to have a natively supported files and avoid the transcode. It's not necessarily stereo, since I will often use Dolby Pro Logic II when a proper AC3 or DTS track is available but I use 2-channel in almost all cases.