WMC and Spun Down Drives

[DigitalDivide]

I'm hoping someone may have an answer for the following problem.

 

I have my dvd's stored on my Unraid server and am using WMC (using My Movies) and TMT.  When trying to play a movie from a drive that is spun down, I get an error along the lines of "drive not available...or found".  I then have to go to Explorer and browse the drive that I want to spin it up, then go back to WMC and play the movie. 

 

Previously I was using TT and Meedios and never had a problem from a spun down drive.

 

Any ideas?

[nAffie]

Back in the days when I started with my mediacenter, I used XP MCE and also MediaPortal, I had my media files stored on another PC. When I tried to access the files, and the drive on that PC was spun down, I couldn't see the files, only after I browsed to the share with Explorer...

 

The problem was solved when I mapped the share to a drive letter...

[dogmanky]

You could put the drive with your movie front end index in the same spinup group as the drive with the movies.  Should always be available that way when you are browsing your catalog.

[rsd]

What version of windows are you using?

 

Using Windows 7 (and Vista prior) I never had this issue.

 

I've accessed videos via WMC on both drives on the Unraid that were spun down and on a separate machine that were spun down and never encountered this issue (or maybe once I got a random error out of many, many times).

[DigitalDivide]

I am using Windows 7 and do have the drives mapped.  I tried opening the folder using TMT outside of WMC and it does sit there and spin up the drive then starts the movie.  However it doesn't do this when using WMC so it leads me to believe WMC doesn't like spun down drives.

 

The funny thing I just noticed was that even though I have the drives mapped to the Unraid Server disk, when I go to Explorer and look at the mapped drives, they show as red when using the View mode of Tiles.  Doesn't this mean that the drives are not connected?  If I click on one, it does turn blue.

 

On a different topic, I noticed that if I right click on one of the mapped drives and select Properties, then go to the Customize tab, there's an option to "Optimize the Folder for".  You can select music, movies etc.  Anyone know what this does and if I should select movies?

[DigitalDivide]

You could put the drive with your movie front end index in the same spinup group as the drive with the movies.  Should always be available that way when you are browsing your catalog.

 

Ehhh huh?   Could you explain?  Actually can you tell me more about spinup groups or is there some documentation I could read?

[lionelhutz]

Maybe this is the problem.

 

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=18610755#post18610755

 

Why don't you just use the unc path or \\Mediaserver\Movies instead of F:\Movies? That's what I do and I don't have problems and I would assume the other posters without problems do that too.

 

Peter

 

 

[DigitalDivide]

Well I'll try the UNC path and see what happens.

[DigitalDivide]

Well using the UNC paths seemed to have solved the problem.  THanks!