Having .avi's show up under My TV

[kobekatt]

I am a very new SageTV user that has just made the switch from BeyondTV. I just received my 2 new HD100's today here in Australia and was delighted how easy they were to get running.

Now, I had my SageTV Server machine built and configured by a friend so I am no expert in doing this. He set me up with 3 HD's (750GB per drive, NICE!) with 3 TV folders.

Before, with BeyondTV, I would be able to move .avi's files into my BeyondTV TV folder and as soon as this happened, it would appear on the Now Playing list. It was very simple and worked great!

Today, I tried doing the same thing with SageTV and placed xxxx.avi into the TV folder and to my surprise, it does NOT show up under My TV on my HD100.

I tried puting it into a Video folder and it showed up with no problem under My Videos, but I have over 300 movies in those folders and it was very hard to find quickly. I really want certain .avi's to appear under My TV.

So my question, and I am sure its been asked a thousand times but searching didnt really help, how can I quickly and easily "drop" a .avi file into the TV folder so it instantly shows up under the TV menu?

Thanks for the info =)

[ke6guj]

SageTV will only show a video file in the My TV section if it has metadata about it stored in the wiz.bin. If not, it will consider it an imported video.

So, in order to add it to My TV, you have to add some data into Sage so that it will consider it a recording. After you have placed it in the recording folder, you can use nielm's webserver plugin to manually add som metadata in and have Sage consider it a recording. Or you may be able to create an .xml file with the metadata in it and then do an .xml import with the webserver.

Depending on the number of avi files, you may want to just create a sub-folder in the imported folders to store the file and just go to that folder in Sage when you want to watch that video, instead of having to scroll through 300 other movies. I use multiple sub-folders to organize my video files. Actually all videos are stored in sub-folders, nothing is kept in the root import folder. Then if I need to quickly watch something like you want to do, I drop the new video into the root folder and rescan. That one video will be the only video in the root and be easily navigated to.

[kobekatt]

Hello Jack,

Thanks a lot for the information.

It's a shame there is no automated way to do this through My TV. It's one of the features I didnt even know was a feature of BeyondTV that I now miss the most.

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by kobekatt

It's a shame there is no automated way to do this through My TV.

Nope, no automated way that I know of. Its just the way SageTV is designed. If SageTV recorded it and knows about it then it is shown in My TV. If not, its an imported video.

It's one of the features I didnt even know was a feature of BeyondTV that I now miss the most.

Its one of those personal preference deals. I personally wany my recordings in one place and my imported videos in another place. Others want to be able to have one large central location where everything is at. And others want something in between the two.