How to organize your movies by genre without actually moving them?

[Rajahal]

Sometimes I know the name of the movie I want to watch and I scroll through the alphabetical list right to the name and fire it up.  However, sometimes I'm in the mood for a particular genre (action, comedy, horror, etc.) but don't have a particular title in mind.  I'm looking for a way to tag my movies or otherwise make them sortable by genre as well as by name.  Any ideas?

 

I've had a few thoughts, but none of them are very good:

1) Append the genre to the end of each movie title, such as 'Death at a Funeral - Comedy'.  This would allow me to search 'comedy' and turn up all the relevant movies.  This of course would also be very time consuming considering I have hundreds of movies.

2) Physically reorganize my movies into genre folders.  Then if I want a movie by name, I can just search for it.  I'm hesitant to do this because it involves physically moving my files around, and some movies cross multiple genres and would be difficult to categorize.

 

I also attempted to do this using Windows 7's new 'libraries' feature, but unfortunately you cannot add network locations to libraries, and of course all my movies are on my networked unRAID server.

[prostuff1]

Sometimes I know the name of the movie I want to watch and I scroll through the alphabetical list right to the name and fire it up.  However, sometimes I'm in the mood for a particular genre (action, comedy, horror, etc.) but don't have a particular title in mind.  I'm looking for a way to tag my movies or otherwise make them sortable by genre as well as by name.  Any ideas?

 

I've had a few thoughts, but none of them are very good:

1) Append the genre to the end of each movie title, such as 'Death at a Funeral - Comedy'.  This would allow me to search 'comedy' and turn up all the relevant movies.  This of course would also be very time consuming considering I have hundreds of movies.

2) Physically reorganize my movies into genre folders.  Then if I want a movie by name, I can just search for it.  I'm hesitant to do this because it involves physically moving my files around, and some movies cross multiple genres and would be difficult to categorize.

 

I also attempted to do this using Windows 7's new 'libraries' feature, but unfortunately you cannot add network locations to libraries, and of course all my movies are on my networked unRAID server.

 

Use a program like XBMC, MediaPortal, etc that has this kinda thing built in.  That is really the easiest way to go about what you are trying to.

[StevenD]

I also attempted to do this using Windows 7's new 'libraries' feature, but unfortunately you cannot add network locations to libraries, and of course all my movies are on my networked unRAID server.

 

Sure you can:

 

[StevenD]

You could also install Media Browser on Win7.  You can sort by Genre.

 

[Joe L.]

Sometimes I know the name of the movie I want to watch and I scroll through the alphabetical list right to the name and fire it up.  However, sometimes I'm in the mood for a particular genre (action, comedy, horror, etc.) but don't have a particular title in mind.  I'm looking for a way to tag my movies or otherwise make them sortable by genre as well as by name.  Any ideas?

 

I've had a few thoughts, but none of them are very good:

1) Append the genre to the end of each movie title, such as 'Death at a Funeral - Comedy'.  This would allow me to search 'comedy' and turn up all the relevant movies.  This of course would also be very time consuming considering I have hundreds of movies.

2) Physically reorganize my movies into genre folders.  Then if I want a movie by name, I can just search for it.  I'm hesitant to do this because it involves physically moving my files around, and some movies cross multiple genres and would be difficult to categorize.

 

I also attempted to do this using Windows 7's new 'libraries' feature, but unfortunately you cannot add network locations to libraries, and of course all my movies are on my networked unRAID server.

I've done this for two categories of movies, and also for the alpha ranges of movies.

 

First, all of my movies are ISO files in the "Movies" user-share.  This "Movies" folder exists on all 10 of my data disks.  By browsing the "Movies" folder I see everything alphabetically by title.

 

Unix/Linux has the concept of links to files.  Actually, every file name is a link to the data blocks that hold the contents of that file.  In Unix/Linux you can have more than one link to the same set of data blocks, as long as they are on the same physical disk.    You can think of the windows "shortcut" as roughly equivalent, but in Linux, the links are all equal in that a reference by any name gets to the file data.  You can link a file to a second name simply by invoking the command

ln existing_name alternate_name

 

Now, the two file names can be in different directories, as long as they are in the same file-system.

 

So, I can have a file named (in the Movies share)

Movies/WHITE_CHRISTMAS.ISO

 

and a second link to the exact same file (In the Movies-Xmas share)

Movies-Xmas/WHITE_CHRISTMAS.ISO

 

The command to create the link would be

ln /mnt/disk1/Movies/WHITE_CHRISTMAS.ISO /mnt/disk1/Movies-Xmas/WHITE_CHRISTMAS.ISO

 

Now, this same file is also linked to the "Movies T-Z" share and it can be found in

Movies T-Z/WHITE_CHRISTMAS.ISO

The command to create the link is:

ln /mnt/disk1/Movies/WHITE_CHRISTMAS.ISO /mnt/disk1/Movies\ T-Z/WHITE_CHRISTMAS.ISO[/b]

 

If I wanted, I could create a Movies-Musical share and link it there too.

Movies-Musical/WHITE_CHRISTMAS.ISO

mkdir /mnt/disk1/Movies-Musical

ln /mnt/disk1/Movies/WHITE_CHRISTMAS.ISO /mnt/disk1/Movies-Musical/WHITE_CHRISTMAS.ISO

 

When removing a link Linux works differently than windows.  All links are equal... when you remove the last link to the file, (delete the last name to it) the data blocks are freed.    Until then, any link can used as the name to access the file.  You can have as many links to a file as you desire, so you can link the same movie as both a Chick-Flick (A love story) and as an Action-Adventure movies.  (Mr & Mrs Smith would fit that set of genre )

 

You cannot link across file-systems, so you cannot link a file on /mnt/disk1 to a file on /mnt/disk2. 

(Well, I lied... you can have "symbolic" links across file-systems, almost exactly like windows shortcuts, but the user-file-system in unRAID does not respect them, so you can't use them with user-shares.)

 

Joe L.

[Rajahal]

Thank you everyone for the responses!

 

Prostuff1: I already have xbmc installed and use it often (though only for SD stuff, since it tends to introduce some tearing during actions scenes in HD videos...but we'll save that for another thread  ).  I'm running xbmc completely stock, no add-ons installed.  Would you direct me towards the appropriate add-on (and any others you consider 'must have')?  Thanks very much.

 

StevenD: I've never heard of MediaBrowser before, thank you for the rec, I'll check it out.  Is it a media player as well (xbmc style)?  Or is it more like CoverFlow on Mac (or whatever its called, I haven't used a Mac in quite a while), just a fancy way to look at your files?

 

Also, good to know that Windows Media Center can handle network shares, but I really despise that program and I would much rather use xbmc.  In fact, I think I already deleted WMC from my Win7 install (I love that it allows you to do that now).  If using WMC just once would allow me to set up libraries the way I wanted and then allow me to uninstall it or never use it again, then I would consider it.

 

JoeL.: Thank you for the very detailed guide to Linux links.  I tend to avoid the command line whenever possible, but I will certainly fall back on your solution if none of these other more turn-key solutions pan out.