I just switched my frontend to using 7MC (Windows Media Center 7) with Media Browser and Media Center Master to get all of the metadata. I re-organized all of my movies so each movie has it's own folder and started MCM (Media Center Master) to fetch all of the metadata for me and all of this is working perfectly so far. I setup Media Browser to list all of my movies by individual disks instead of the "Movies" share hoping that when I launched a movie it would only spin up that one disk since it was calling it by the disk instead of searching thru the share. My problem lies before that in the metadata is stored in each of the movies own folders so when I launch Media Browser it starts to spin up all of my drives to show the covers and movie info. Now I know Media Browser will cache the covers and am not sure if I just let it go thru and cache all of my covers if this problem will be solved or not but then what about the movie info, I don't think that gets cached.

 

Just curious how others are doing this.

 

I know there are debates as to if it really that bad to have your drives spun up alot like that and I know thats what drives are designed to do but me personally I think it would be nice to be able to browse thru my movies and launch a movie and only have that single drive spun up.

 

Thanks for any input,

Scott

I don't believe there is any way around it. MediaBrowser also scans the media locations to see what has changed. MediaBrowser seems to take some time to fetch the data the first time the movies are opened each new time it starts. So, it seems to read through the images and data that first time it's opened.

 

Maybe, if you used the cache directory script and didn't have any local metadata then it would not spin up the disks. You'd have to allow it to fetch the data itself which in my experience sometimes doesn't work very well.

 

There are 2 ways around it that I can think of.

 

You break the movies into different groups per drive and then browse just to that drive. Doesn't help when you don't know what you are looking for and are just looking for something interesting to watch.

 

You could put all the folders on one drive with just the images and metadata and a link to the actual movie stored on another drive. This would be a pain to create and maintain.

 

Peter

 

Thanks. Are you running this setup? If so how are you handling this?

 

 

Thanks,

Scott

Or I guess my other option is just to let it spin up the drives.....is it really that bad?

 

 

I have Movies and TV Shows spanning 4 disks on unRaid.  The first time I ran MediaBrowser it took a long time to cache all the info, with the drives being spun up.  Now, when I open MB, the titles load very quickly with no drive spinups.  However, if I add a new movie, MB will spin up the corresponding drive to read the metadata and cache it. 

 

I run 7MC with MB and unRaid with cache_dirs.

Thanks Rob...so the metadata is cached as well...that is a relief. I will just start up Media Browser and let it sit to cache everything.

 

In Media Browser did you specify each individual disk or just the Movies and TV shares?

 

Thanks for your input!!!

I use metabrowser to fetch all the metadata, so I don't have experience with MediaCenterMaster.  MetaBrowser, however, stores all the actual info in .xml and .jpg files located within the Movie or TV Show folder on unRaid.  But, if you look here:

 

C:\ProgramData\MediaBrowser\Cache

 

you will see several subfolders that contain images, etc.  I believe this is the local client side cache.

 

I have user shares set up to serve the data, but when writing to the server, I go directly to the disk shares.  Thus, my MediaBrowser has only 2 entry points:  Movies (share) and TV Shows (share).  When I play a movie, unRaid only spins up that drive which contains that movie.  In my rig, all my movies are stored on just 2 disks, so I don't worry so much about spinups.  I could see where this might be an issue if you had many disks containing movies, though.

Thanks....I have the opposite. User Share for MCM which seems to work just like MetaBrowser and disk shares for Media Browser. I only have 250gb disks so I am running 10 of them so yeah it's annoying to spin all of them up  I also assume Cache_Dirs is helping you also. I have this setup too and worked OK when all of my movies were in one folder (I still had unnecessary spin-ups but not as many) so I just have to make sure I still have the right switches setup.

 

I suppose if I switch MCM to use disk shares it will help the spin-ups when I add movies.

 

Again maybe I am being a bit silly worrying about all of the spin-ups...who knows

Thanks. Are you running this setup? If so how are you handling this?

 

 

Thanks,

Scott

 

Yes. I have a movies share on 2 drives and a TV share on a 3rd drive. The TV drive always spins up if I go to the TV and the Movies always spin up if I go to the movies.

 

I just let the drives spin up. I think I have a 3 hour spin down delay on them.

 

It may help if you install the cache directory script. Then, MediaBrowser would not have to actually read the hard drives to see if the media is still there since it could pull that info from the cached memory on the server.

 

I can tell you it will not work without the cache directory script. MediaBrowser always does some amount of disk access, I believe as a minimum it will scan the share and see it if has changed.

 

Peter

 

Ok thanks for your input.