.properties files and metadata configuration ?

[Brent94Z]

Hello!

I've been using SageTV for many years and over those years I tweaked everything to get it working just the way I wanted. But, my damn server crashed a few months ago (and my backups were no good. ugh) so I'm rebuilt everything and am finally getting it up and running but have a few issues that I'm not sure about.

I took 4 recording drives out of the old computer and put them in my new SageTV server computer. I have these listed as recording drives. I was using Gemstone but I wanted to get everything else working before I installed Gemstone so that is NOT currently installed. Last night I downloaded all the BMT/Pheonix type plugins. I have the following installed:

Phoenix 2.5.3
BMT 4.10.1
CMT 3.0.8
Phoenix Fanart 0.1.9

I had all this installed (pretty sure) on my previous Sage computer a few months ago so am trying to go back to close to what I had.

I'm getting there but have a couple items I'm not able to figure out.

1) For all my recording drives, I pretty much only had the recordings themselves. However, something that I've done, I now have a .properties file for damn neared every recording. I remember something about not needing these .properties files but, as you can imagine, a search for that here gets tons of results. I found a setting to say "No" to the creating of .properties files but it was defaulted to "Yes"... not sure why? Has this changed or can I change this setting to "No" to NOT make those files and then manually delete all the .properties files without harming anything?

2) My Phoenix fanart folder location as listed under the Sage Detailed Setup for "Phoenix Central Fanart Folder" was defaulted at "\userφart" or something very similar to that and that clearly isn't correct so I changed it to "C:\Program Files (x86)\SageTV\SageTV\userdata\Phoenix\Fanart" but it appears to chopping off everything after SageTV\SageTV? I see something else recent about this so will do some more reading up on it but I think last time I had the fanart folder as a share in the root folder like "C:\fanart". Would that be a good idea just to do that again? Not sure why I had it like that before... can't remember the reason why I made all the tweaks I did. DOH!

3) I found the below setting for "Manual Metadata Files Directory" and I don't know why but it is showing one of my recording directories? This doesn't seem right and I don't even really know exactly what it does? But, shouldn't this be a folder that is NOT part of my recordings folder? I'm thinking if it is storing metadata that it shouldn't be in just one of my four recording folders and instead be maybe a folder on my C: drive? It might be for CMT but I see Phoenix stuff in there so will throw it in with this post.

Thanks for any assistance!

[JREkiwi]

Originally Posted by Brent94Z

3) I found the below setting for "Manual Metadata Files Directory" and I don't know why but it is showing one of my recording directories? This doesn't seem right and I don't even really know exactly what it does? But, shouldn't this be a folder that is NOT part of my recordings folder? I'm thinking if it is storing metadata that it shouldn't be in just one of my four recording folders and instead be maybe a folder on my C: drive? It might be for CMT but I see Phoenix stuff in there so will throw it in with this post.

It is a CMT setting. A legacy function that's in it is to be able to create .properties files for airings (without a video file) and that's the location where CMT stores them.

John

[Brent94Z]

Originally Posted by JREkiwi

It is a CMT setting. A legacy function that's in it is to be able to create .properties files for airings (without a video file) and that's the location where CMT stores them.

John

Thanks! By "Legacy" I'm guessing you are meaning something along the lines of "left in there for compatibility"? Since I didn't notice the option to say "No" to generating properties files, will there be any problem with turning it off and then deleting all the properties files? Thanks!

[hemicuda]

I just dropped my satchel and upgraded the HTPC & Save to v7. Before switching the old server offline I was testing 7 on the new machine to get a feel for it. Over a couple of days I managed to get .properties files for my entire movie library (TV series are a pain due to archaic naming).

I started "fresh" with a copy of my v6.6 setup and then upgraded to v7. Now it seems ALL my posters/backgrounds are in limbo in both the default STV and Phoenix. Metadata still shows the movie's description. Posters/backgrounds are still sitting in the /userdata folder for Phoenix. Somehow the images have become orphaned from the .properties files it would seem.

Can someone help with an easy way to fix this? I have BMT installed on the default STV and have Phoenix 2 installed as an alternate.