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Organizing A Very Large Movie Library

18K views 8 replies 9 participants last post by  aliaskary77 
#1 ·
I'm curious how everyone with a large movie collection organizes their files on their computer. So far I'm up to 12 TB of Movies and the same methods I used to use are no longer working for me.


While transferring my first 1,000 movies (which were some DVD and most BluRay) I separated the movies into distinct categories. I did this because I didn't like the way MediaBrowser's "genre" breakdown worked. Metadata scarpers are notorious for adding useless genres that don't fit to the movie and with other movies certain genres that fit that movie are excluded. It ticked me off to no end since adult movies weren't being filtered out of the "family" genre. So I reorganized my entire collection, only around 500 movies at the time, into genres and added the categories in MediaBrowser.


It went something like this: D:/Movies/Comedy/Friday(1995) and D:/Movies/Kids/Cars(2006) and so on. I categorized on my drives in folders of Horror, comedies, kids, war, documentary, foreign, rom-coms, and box sets. In MediaBrowser I added the categories to the home screen and you could easily select your favorite genre. I also included a separate folder and category for NEW RELEASES which always had around 30 new and recent movies that hadn't been transferred yet. My wife loved this category and said it reminded her of browsing the New Release isle at Blockbuster.


Well a few years later and many hard drives later my category system is quickly becoming inefficient. To start I made the move to XBMC and I can no longer separate by genre, something I wasn't too happy with, but the faster interface and ease of XBMC made the switch necessary. I still kept my movies separated just in case, but now I have some genres that spill over onto a second drive because there are so many.


I have been contemplating just having a massive folder with hundreds of movies in it and just letting the XBMC handle the organizing, but I still hate the way genres are separated. Does the community have a way that they organize their files? Looking for some creative ideas, or maybe I'm just over thinking it.
 
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#5 ·
Wouldn't (and don't) use file folders for genre as movies are multiple genre, where you think it should fall may change, and no system is going to recognize your folder as a genre when doing sorting. I do have TV, DVD, BR separated but that is more about vob vs. MKV ways I've copied my collection that I want an easy way to address it later. I'd only do a separate folder thing like that for genre if there was a class you wanted to always have separated from the others to hide it from general use or to make it so you just had specific folder for 'kids' for example.

Everything else I would decide what genre I wanted and apply it myself to the collection management software I'm using (I edit every title I add to things like MyMovies). Given your apparent desire for specificity around your own feeling of genre, I don't see any other way for you to be happy with it.
 
#6 ·
If you're using XBMC. your movies should each be in their own folder named appropriate Movie Name (Year). One movie per folder. You do it this way in XBMC, you'll thank me later. You do it any other way and you'll be posting on their forums asking why your movies aren't scraping properly and aren't showing up in your library.
 
#7 ·
In xbmc you can create custom playlists based on many separate factors. With some skins you can have these custom playlist show-up on the home menu. I use Aeon mq4 currently b/c it is easily customized once you figure it out.


Using the custom playlists you can use your old method of separate folders. I just use a kids and dvd folder to separate things. You are stuck with skins that support adding the custom playlists to the home menu though.
 
#8 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by macks  /t/1453410/organizing-a-very-large-movie-library#post_22863357


Using the custom playlists you can use your old method of separate folders. I just use a kids and dvd folder to separate things. You are stuck with skins that support adding the custom playlists to the home menu though.

If you are willing to modify the skin XML, you can modify the home menu to add items that point to a custom playlist. The details on how to do this are in the following post on the XBMC forums:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=89678


I followed this to add a Kids Movies section and a kids TV section item to the Transparency! Skin to help my kids (6 and 4) more easily find their stuff.
 
#9 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by acfarrey  /t/1453410/organizing-a-very-large-movie-library#post_22866356


If you are willing to modify the skin XML, you can modify the home menu to add items that point to a custom playlist. The details on how to do this are in the following post on the XBMC forums:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=89678


I followed this to add a Kids Movies section and a kids TV section item to the Transparency! Skin to help my kids (6 and 4) more easily find their stuff.

you could do it manually, or use skins with this feature. aeon mq4 and aeon nox are two that i am playing with.
 
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