Serviio

All,

I am new to the media server game and I have a bunch of hard drives containing media files. I wound up looking at Serviio because other people recommended it, partly because Serviio can handle .srt and other subtitle files well.

Currently I use USB hard drives (different sizes from 500GB to 4TB) connected [one or two at a time] to A C Ryan's Play On media player. Works great. But.. I am tired up maintaining several copies of the same file. It would be nice to have one copy for sharing, and another for the backup.

More. I have a set of Music directories /Pop /Blues /Jazz-Vocals /Lounge, and so on. Inside there are not only music files, but also music videos. For example, under /Pop-a/f/FleetwoodMac is another directory /videos Having this set of directories makes it easy to find the videos related to a group / band.

So, from what little I know of Serviio, I have a problem. How to deal with this.

My intent was to take a PC I am not using now, upgrade the internal parts to my previous main PC parts, which I took out and put back in the original boxes, when I upgraded it in 2013. The motherboard, etc will be more than needed for a Ubuntu [Linux] Server. The case allows me to install 10 hard drives, and I think I will fill it up with one of the set of backup drives I already have, of various sizes. It looks like the only thing I need to buy is a HBA that will allow me to connect to those drives the motherboard won't. The PC has a monitor etc, so even though a server, it can be worked on like a normal PC.

I would really like to NOT have to reconfigure or rename all those files. What advice can you offer?

Best regards, AraiBob

Welcome!

I have seven hard drives myself, so I understand wanting to maintain what you have. I don't think you'll have any issue with the files when you put the drives in a new computer. Since you will be installing Serviio from scratch on the Linux box, you can't just copy over the database. That means it will have to build itself after installation. Once you've configured all your shared locations in the Serviio console, just give it some time to build itself. I have heard at least one user with thousands of files state that it took overnight to fully populate the DB. But if a file is named correctly now there should be no issue with your new installation.

When I first set up a media server, my wife saw no value to the thing. However, you now can't pry it from her fingers. She completely enjoys having our entire movie and TV episode library available on every TV in the house, and with playlists can enjoy continuous movies in whatever order she desires. Doesn't matter if the Internet goes kaput, or if Netflix or Amazon have streaming issues. In our house everything just works.

You don't need to rename files if you don't want to use the online metadata sources. Turn off metadata for your shared folder and on the presentation tab only enable the folder view, disabling all others.

Having said that, I think there's a lot of benefit to using metadata. Renaming is painful but it's a once off hit. You may want to look at Filebot from the tools area. You can batch rename files very quickly... appreciate for 1000's of files it will still take a bit of effort.

Thank you, for the two replies.

I was wondering if I had to 'rename' the files, but I did not see where that is specified. Having a LOT of files means this process will take weeks.

Yes, I have a PyRenamer, which I use regularly. But to rename over 60,000 files? not exciting...

I can't build my pc just yet. I have to find a HBA (host bus adapter) that will accomodate sata hard drives of differing sizes. from 500GB to 4TB. I will start with the drives I already have, and slowly replace the smaller drives with larger, copying what was on the smaller file via usb connection to the replacement drive. Tedious, but I can take my time with that task, too.

One thing? the setup I saw implied only one directory for all videos, one directory for all music, and one directory for all pictures. That is not the case for me. How to manage this one?

Any other advice? is greatly appreciated.

AraiBob

No, you can have multiple folders containing any types of media. I'm not aware of any limits (plus when you share a folder all sub-folders are included, so you don't need to share them individually). For each folder you share you can tell it which type of media it contains (which can be video, images or music or any combination of).

So you shouldn't have a problem