Directory Structure

Hello all... As this is my first post to this forum allow me to introduce myself.

My name is Zach and I am fairly new to serviio and dnla servers in general. I am currently using serviio to "share" my videos with a roku 1. All in all I think that serviio is GREAT and it certainly does what I need, and it does it in a stable and predictable manner... Kudos serviio team.

There is one problem that I can't seem to solve, and from the searches I have done there may not be a way, but here 'goes.

I use rss feeds to download LEGAL videos automatically. These videos go to a partition... we will call it V:\. Some of the videos go into the root, say "v:\whichever.mp4" and some will go into their own folder, say "v:\whatver\whatever.mp4". I have no control over this... just how the file is setup on download.

Since the metadata lookup picks "some" files up and misses the others (they appear to be named the same) I cannot simply select "display content" under "series" because half of the files are missing.

If I select "display content" under folders, I end up with some of the files showing up under "v:\" in the list, some of the files showing up under "v:\whatever" in the list, and some of the files showing up under the "series" list... so I have to look two or three places for the files.

Since my goal here is automation... renaming each file to try and conform to the metadata search is out of the question... and completely against the point. Therefore I am left with one "desired" alternative...

I desperately want to get this (or another if necessary) server to simply look for all compatible video files in "v:\" and all of it's sub directories (which serviio does) and then simply display all of those files... just the files... not the directory structure (which serviio does not appear capable of). In this way one could simply select "videos", and then see all of their videos in alphabetical order, or date added order, or whatever.

I know this is technically "possible" because serviio kind of does this with the "last added" or "unwatched" or something like that. Is there anyway to spoof the server into viewing all files in that way?

[DenyAll]

Welcome aboard.

The bad news is no, I don't think it's possible. There are some things you can do:

• if you are not going to use metadata, you may wish to turn it off for that shared folder. That will speed up library updates. Do this in the library, Shared Folders tab and uncheck under the "M" symbol.
• Under the Presentation tab disable everything except folders.

while this will clean up your interface it won't collapse all files to a flat level, which is what I think you are after. Files will appear in their sub folders, much like they do on the drive.

I'm not aware of a way of doing what you want (other than moving the physical file to the root folder of the share) or by using metadata (which requires renaming to comply with the scheme) but others may be able to assist. Some people have automated the renaming process if that's a path you want to explore.

I thought about writing a batch script to pull every video file out of their subdirectory and scheduling that to run every hour or so on the host pc... but that kind of seems sloppy (and I can't quite seem to remember how to do it). The automated renaming to comply with the metadata search would be preferable... as i could then use the "series" presentation the way it is supposed to be.

Any "coding gods" want to jump in here? I will be searching the forum for how to automate the renaming process.