More fun with Media Center
Mar 11th, 2008 by Jay Howerter
When I first started my Media Center project I had setup a Windows dynamic volume to store all the movies. As I have previously posted, I purchased a 500GB MyBook to expand my space. After the USB/eSATA debacle, I discovered that Western Digital had designed the MyBook to spin down after 10 minutes of inactivity. This is a feature that you cannot disable. I wrote a couple of programs to try and mitigate this, but with no success. I made the decision to remove the dynamic volume and use separate disks. Because of this, I lost about half of my ripped movies. When you remove a disk from a spanned dynamic volume, you lose the whole volume. I have been in the process of re-ripping my movies. Unfortunately, when using separate disks it is difficult to have a video library that is uniform. I didn’t want to have to choose the drive letter and then find the movies or shows from there. I wanted to have all the movies in one “directory”. I decided to use play lists to accomplish this. I wrote service to watch the drives that I store movies on and when a new MPEG is created, create a play list and store it in a directory that Media Center Monitors. This makes one unified “directory” of files.
