Media Distributed Across Multiple Drives

[flickeringsight]

Hi everyone. I'm still in the planning stages of my home media server, on which I plan to install Amahi, that will have two or three hard drives devoted to media with room for future expansion. Playback will be handled by media boxes like Western Digital TV or Popcorn Hour.

My question is: if I have, lets say, movie files stored across multiple drives will they be represented together in a single group list on the playback boxes? I want to avoid unnecessary menu navigation while looking for a specific title.

Thank you.

[pjcrux]

Hi everyone. I'm still in the planning stages of my home media server, on which I plan to install Amahi, that will have two or three hard drives devoted to media with room for future expansion. Playback will be handled by media boxes like Western Digital TV or Popcorn Hour.

Very Nice, I have a similar setup.

My question is: if I have, lets say, movie files stored across multiple drives will they be represented together in a single group list on the playback boxes? I want to avoid unnecessary menu navigation while looking for a specific title.

Are you referring to LVM? If you are using LVM when you format your drives and the file is spread across multiple drives then yes only one file will show.

However, if you are referring to multiple iterations of the same file Amahi is not capable of deduplication.

But what I think you are ultimately referring to is multiple folders where the media will be stored. There are apps such as Ushare that view the entire drive and will pic any type of multimedia file (pic, song, video, etc) and be able to stream via Upnp to say an Xbox360 or PS3. But then there are other applications such as Tin Can jukebox where you can set the folder to where the files are located.

I'm grasping at straws here does this help? Please clarify your question a bit more!

[flickeringsight]

Hi. thanks for the reply. What I'm describing is a situation where, lets say, I've filled my drives and add a new drive. I may end up with a couple of drives that each contain movie files, music files, etc. I'm curious how Amahi and the playback boxes will handle menu organization and playback with media types located here and there. Will all my available files be concacted into a single list or will I have to go searching for them on this drive then that one, which I want to avoid happening.

[cpg]

if it's managed with LVM or RAID in a way that looks like the same (seemingly virtualized) directory, it should not affect the streaming server or the shares.

LVM or RAID are currently beyond the scope of what Amahi manages.

[broccolin]

I'm sure that an answer has been found by now... but what I did was just create a symlink. In terminal, navigate to /var/hda/files/movies/ and to create a link to a folder on an external drive first get sudo access then say 'ln -s /media/external\ drive \name/videos/ linkedvids1' This just creates a new folder in your movies folder called linkedvids1 which contains all the files from the videos folder on your external drive.

Hope this helps somebody.