switched to vista : stupid problem

subway

ive been out of work so long that my mind is dissolving.
i installed vista again today on my htpc.
as usual it looks and sounds lovely.

its a little slow, but it is a p4 2.0 running 512mb of sdram,
but thats beside the point...

my problem lies with the new all in one media library
on xp mce i decided which folders had music in them, which had video, and which had images and that was that.
i used folder.jpg to identify folders (music and video)
however vista hgas decided to pollute my pictures gallery with thousands of folders containing album covers and tv show title screens.
my videos folder contains my music folder because i have a few music videos cataloged with their respective albums.
and worst of all, my c:\ drive shows up everywjere because it contains all of the above.
i never added c:\ to my library.

can anyone advise on how to get around the folder.jpg issue?

thanks

mathias

MCE needs to have things a certain way ,

First off you should have all your music in a certain folder , like my music , in there should be subfolders for albums ,
Each album should have its own folder , and in each folder should be the album tracks and one file with the album artwork called folder.jpg , if its done this way all will be tidy.

No version of MCE , including XP MCE , can handle video and music in a single folder without making a mess.

You can stop Vista searching other folders for pictures or music , go to the relevant section in MCE , for instance in my pictures icon, right click on it , go to setup , and tell it to only look in a certain folder for pictures ,in that folder should be your pictures with subfolders for occasions like say , holiday 2007 and so on , once you do this all the random stuff will dissappear , likewise , you can do the same thing with you music.

I suggest moving the music videos out of the album folders or copying them to my videos if you want MCE to show them.

Basically like any organiser , it likes to have things a certain way , if you just let it search your whole pc for filetypes it will make an unholy mess .

mathias

Also one of the things about Vista is it needs lots of memory , the search function in MCE will run like a dog unless you give Vista 2GB of memory , mine was terrible on 1GB , I can only imagine how bad it is with 512MB

subway

mathias wrote:

MCE needs to have things a certain way ,

First off you should have all your music in a certain folder , like my music , in there should be subfolders for albums ,
Each album should have its own folder , and in each folder should be the album tracks and one file with the album artwork called folder.jpg , if its done this way all will be tidy.

No version of MCE , including XP MCE , can handle video and music in a single folder without making a mess.

You can stop Vista searching other folders for pictures or music , go to the relevant section in MCE , for instance in my pictures icon, right click on it , go to setup , and tell it to only look in a certain folder for pictures ,in that folder should be your pictures with subfolders for occasions like say , holiday 2007 and so on , once you do this all the random stuff will dissappear , likewise , you can do the same thing with you music.

I suggest moving the music videos out of the album folders or copying them to my videos if you want MCE to show them.

Basically like any organiser , it likes to have things a certain way , if you just let it search your whole pc for filetypes it will make an unholy mess .

have you used vista?
the point is that there is just one set of monitored folders from the standard options.
is there a way to split them?
ive separated them in wmp11 but ive been advised tht this may not be permanent as vista will figure out what ive done and mix it all up again.

its irrelevant that ive archived some music videos with the mp3s, i dont want them to show up in mce, and in mce2005 that isnt a problem.

wrt ram, ill be upgrading if i can get this setup working as it is quite laggy, to say the least...

subway

mathias wrote:

First off you should have all your music in a certain folder , like my music , in there should be subfolders for albums ,
Each album should have its own folder , and in each folder should be the album tracks and one file with the album artwork called folder.jpg , if its done this way all will be tidy.

how do you stop all them folder.jpg's from showing up in your picture library?

mathias

have you used vista?
the point is that there is just one set of monitored folders from the standard options.
is there a way to split them?

Ive been using Vista on a HTPC since March , and XP MCE for two years before that ,
I have over 6000 albums on there , about 50 music DVD's , all my photo collections , and all are neatly shown without any of the mess you have!!

The solution is simple , like I said , right click on the feature you want , choose settings and get to the point where you should get a folder tree , the default folders will be ticked already , if you have set MCE to search your entire computer then C ( including subfolders ) will be ticked.

Thats whats wrong with your setup , its searching the entire drive or computer and dragging everything to where it thinks it should be. Which includes grabbing all your album covers and showing them in my pictures.

Untick that ( C or my computer including subfolders ) , and for pictures just tick the my pictures folder and subfolders , likewise for music etc .
So what you should have when you are set up correctly is a system that only searches my pictures for pictures , my music for music , my videos for videos etc.

Simple .... Thats all you have to do.

This is what your looking for ,

http://www.krunker.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/WindowsLiveWriter/WindowsVistaRC1MediaCenterSetup_1449E/vistamce22%5B2%5D.jpg

And here is a step by step ,

http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/71f08036-29ee-4fa0-9e74-2c32799100001033.mspx

subway

i have been using mce for about 2 years too etc etc

in casse you didnt read my first post properly, i have done all that already...
i dont have c added to my library, it has just shown up.
i have checked, doubled checked and checked again.

i am not new to htpc so there is no need toi point me in the direction of a newbies guide.

does ayone have anymore info on this?

stevejazzx

subway wrote:

ive been out of work so long that my mind is dissolving.
i installed vista again today on my htpc.
as usual it looks and sounds lovely.

its a little slow, but it is a p4 2.0 running 512mb of sdram,
but thats beside the point...

Vista seems to be constantly doing stuff...prcesses in the background etc
A good cpu is essential I think..i'm using an opty 146 with a gig of ram and even that is struggling..although i was using a athlon 4000 and a gig of ram and that was fine.very smooth..I'm about to swap the opty for a x2 4200 and another gig of ram...funny how xp smoothly can run on 256mb and vista requires at least 4 times that

subway wrote:

my problem lies with the new all in one media library

How do you mean all in one library? I'm using Home premium and you've got seperate libraries for each section

subway wrote:

on xp mce i decided which folders had music in them, which had video, and which had images and that was that.

Why use any other folders apart from windows set folders?
Do you mean you created new master folders? I just make sure to have all my music inside the windows system folder 'my music' thats important fro easy organisation in mce but i'm sure you know that...

subway wrote:

I used folder.jpg to identify folders (music and video)

Whats folder.jpg? Why do you need to identify folders? With my set up windows automatically attributes the correct jpg to the correct file.

subway wrote:

however vista hgas decided to pollute my pictures gallery with thousands of folders containing album covers and tv show title screens.
my videos folder contains my music folder because i have a few music videos cataloged with their respective albums.
and worst of all, my c:\ drive shows up everywjere because it contains all of the above.
i never added c:\ to my library.

You probably included it once by accident and now it justs automatically shows up...not much help to you i know but I'm not exactly sure what the problem is...

thanks[/quote]

subway

stevejazzx wrote:

Vista seems to be constantly doing stuff...prcesses in the background etc
A good cpu is essential I think..i'm using an opty 146 with a gig of ram and even that is struggling..although i was using a athlon 4000 and a gig of ram and that was fine.very smooth..I'm about to swap the opty for a x2 4200 and another gig of ram...funny how xp smoothly can run on 256mb and vista requires at least 4 times that

im already switching back to mce, was taking 30 seconds to start live tv,
45+ to access recorded tv....

How do you mean all in one library? I'm using Home premium and you've got seperate libraries for each section

mathias posted this picture above which shows that pictues, videos and music are monitored as one library, vista then detremines whats in each folder and moves it acordingly
http://www.krunker.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/WindowsLiveWriter/WindowsVistaRC1MediaCenterSetup_1449E/vistamce22%5B2%5D.jpg

Why use any other folders apart from windows set folders?
Do you mean you created new master folders? I just make sure to have all my music inside the windows system folder 'my music' thats important fro easy organisation in mce but i'm sure you know that...

my c drive is a 15 gig partiiton of 2 dynamically managed 250gig drives, my media drive is a 300 gig attached storage device.
its not possible for me to set it up using windows defults,
thats why i removed them from my monitored fodlers and assigned my own

Whats folder.jpg? Why do you need to identify folders? With my set up windows automatically attributes the correct jpg to the correct file.

windows doesnt store attributes for dvds on the hard drive (unless you have a dvdid.xml which i dont have for all my dvds), it doesnt store attributes for xvid or mpeg either so inserting a folder .jpg of the title screen identifys the folders contents, just looks neater imo
not all of my music is tagged using fodler.jpg but alot of it is, wmp + amg are not nearly as exhaustive as tag+rename and google images

You probably included it once by accident and now it justs automatically shows up...not much help to you i know but I'm not exactly sure what the problem is...

i installed vista less than 40 minutes before i posted, i know what i did.
the fix i identified was taht of vista identified a video, say c;\users\public\video and you unmonitor that folder it adds the root of the drive so you dont foget you hve a video.
it can be fulkly removed in wmp by switiching from the music to the movies view


thankss for the reply, im on my way back to mce now but it seems my install discs are fcuked.
woohoo

stevejazzx

subway wrote:

im already switching back to mce, was taking 30 seconds to start live tv,
45+ to access recorded tv....

thats mental
xp mce was much easier on the hardware..i couldn't go back now vista is just too dran pretty.....

subway wrote:

mathias posted this picture above which shows that pictues, videos and music are monitored as one library, vista then detremines whats in each folder and moves it acordingly
http://www.krunker.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/WindowsLiveWriter/WindowsVistaRC1MediaCenterSetup_1449E/vistamce22%5B2%5D.jpg

ah okay the original setup
you see i didn't run that and just organised it as i needed..that way at each interval you get an option Which folders to add but i realise that some people with massive libraries would like to get it all done in the beginning

subway wrote:

my c drive is a 15 gig partiiton of 2 dynamically managed 250gig drives, my media drive is a 300 gig attached storage device.
its not possible for me to set it up using windows defults,
thats why i removed them from my monitored fodlers and assigned my own

ahh ok you'd think that that should be easy to organise in something as advanced as vista but there you go..

subway wrote:

thankss for the reply, im on my way back to mce now but it seems my install discs are fcuked.
woohoo

you're having a great day:)

subway

the original setup is the only option i was ever getting.
if i opened the library options from pictures or video or music it still showed the same folders in each.

it really was unuseably slow,
guess ill find out again in a few months when i upgrade to vista properly

mathias

mathias posted this picture above which shows that pictues, videos and music are monitored as one library, vista then detremines whats in each folder and moves it acordingly

Actually no , its not monitored as one library , that picture was pulled from the net for convenience , As I posted twice , if you start from the main menu and select each one , then right click , you get an individual set up for each separate library.

As a matter of fact , having just tried it today , if you still have defaults enabled , it will ask you do you want to add any folders on entering each separate library , if you say yes , you get to alter the folders to watch in each one.

Thats what I meant !

Vista does not manage everything as one library!