WMC Won't Recognize Movie Directories

[cnei]

Hi,

I've been combing the 'net for a couple days now with no helpful posts. It seems this forum has the most knowledgeable participants, so here it goes...

I've been using WMC on a Dell Studio laptop (64-bit i7 Dual Quad-core procs w/ 8Gb). I LOVE IT! Everything works as it should without any hassles or tricks. Here, I'm using the OS that was installed from the factory.

I then decided to upgrade my Dell mini m1210 (32-bit dual-core atom proc w/ 1Gb) from Vista to Win7 and start using WMC there too. Certainly, I didn't expect any thing to be quite as snappy as my Studio, but I thought things would still work.

The problem:
The Movie Library won't recognize my movie folders on my mini. I'm using an external USB drive to hold the movie files. However, I also tried copying them to the HD with no joy. I can add the directories via 'Manage Library', but it never finds movies on my mini.

I can take the same USB drive to my Studio. There, WMC finds and adds the movies just fine. Also, I can use Media Player on the Mini to play the movies, but not WMC.

The closest I got to success was after I downloaded and installed 'My Movies for WMC'. After that, WMC did find the movies on my USB drive. It even added them and confirmed my desire to pull in movie info, and told me the movies were added. However, after all that the movies did not show up for selection. WMC simply states... "There are no movies in this library yet..."

Does anyone have any advice on how to get my movies to show up in my Movie Library?

-cnei!

 

[not so gray matter]

In other words, your entire computer can't read the disk or can't read the files?

I'd suggest that you try sharing the data over the network, it's possible that could work.

If you can't read the files, try downloading DivX & AC3 Filter, that might show them.

 

[cnei]

Thanks for the quick response!

Sorry I wasn't clear about this. The Mini can indeed see the files on my external USB drive. I can see them in Explorer and play them via Media Player. As a poor man's approach, I can create a directory of shortcuts that launch each movie on my USB drive in Media Player. WMC even recognizes them during discovery, but never shows them after discovery is completed.

The whole point of doing this on the Mini is to watch my movies away from my home network.

 

[cnei]

Any chance the processor or shoddy video card would cause these problems? The video card has less than the recommended 64Mb. I thought that would only affect performance though, and not cause problems like this.

Has anyone gotten WMC to work on an Atom NetBook?

 

[mikinho]

WMC works great on Atom (and even better on Atom\Ion) Netbooks given proper setup and expectations.

What type of movies are you trying to play? i.e. VIDEO_TS, .mkv, .avi, ...?

 

[cnei]

VIDEO_TS
My Movies does find my movies and claims to add them during Directory Monitoring, but they just do not show up in WMC.

Thanks for keeping the thread alive Mikinho,

-cnei!

 

[tootal2]

add the folder as a short cut in your public video Library folder and it will show up. Thats what i have to do. because wmc is so buggy it wont let my add anymore folder to my library. and no body here will tell me how to fix it.

Hi,

I've been combing the 'net for a couple days now with no helpful posts. It seems this forum has the most knowledgeable participants, so here it goes...

I've been using WMC on a Dell Studio laptop (64-bit i7 Dual Quad-core procs w/ 8Gb). I LOVE IT! Everything works as it should without any hassles or tricks. Here, I'm using the OS that was installed from the factory.

I then decided to upgrade my Dell mini m1210 (32-bit dual-core atom proc w/ 1Gb) from Vista to Win7 and start using WMC there too. Certainly, I didn't expect any thing to be quite as snappy as my Studio, but I thought things would still work.

The problem:
The Movie Library won't recognize my movie folders on my mini. I'm using an external USB drive to hold the movie files. However, I also tried copying them to the HD with no joy. I can add the directories via 'Manage Library', but it never finds movies on my mini.

I can take the same USB drive to my Studio. There, WMC finds and adds the movies just fine. Also, I can use Media Player on the Mini to play the movies, but not WMC.

The closest I got to success was after I downloaded and installed 'My Movies for WMC'. After that, WMC did find the movies on my USB drive. It even added them and confirmed my desire to pull in movie info, and told me the movies were added. However, after all that the movies did not show up for selection. WMC simply states... "There are no movies in this library yet..."

Does anyone have any advice on how to get my movies to show up in my Movie Library?

-cnei!

 

[cnei]

Re: public videos folder

No joy. I added a shortcut from the video folder to my USB drive. My Movies folder monitoring discovered 38 movies, but the "movie library" says there are no items in the library yet.

Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[mikinho]

Delete your WMP database to see if there is a corruption there preventing the libraries from populating properly. To delete the *.wmdb files found under %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Media Player\

You'll need to stop a service if you've had Media Center running or reboot and then delete before running Media Center.

 

[cnei]

Delete your WMP database to see if there is a corruption there preventing the libraries from populating properly.

Score! That was it!!!

THANK YOU!

 

[mikinho]

Glad I could help