play button

[Aslena]

I have PVD setup on my main PC (wired) and a couple of laptops (using 300 Mb wireless) that are connected to TV's I also have a Freenas server with all of my movies on it, and I'm running the firebird server on my main PC.

My problem is that on the laptops the "Play" button for the movies is greyed out part of the time even though the proper path to the movies is in the DB. It seems like PVD or Firebird is scanning to make sure the files are there every so often and during the scan the play button is greyed out (not really sure if this is what is happening).

Has anyone experienced this or know why it does this, and is there anything I can do about it?

Love the program so far other than this one issue

[rick.ca]

Welcome, Aslena.

I don't use the program in a network environment, so I'm not sure what it might be doing differently. My testing suggests it only needs something in the Media label field to enable the play command—and that doesn't even have to be valid. Nor does it need a path. So I'd be surprised to learn it uses some more advanced criteria to decide movies on a network should not be playable.

You say the button "is greyed out part of the time." Does that mean for the same movie, it's sometimes greyed out, and other times not? If so, could it be a simple refresh issue (i.e., the button will appear on refresh)? Does the state of other connections to the database have any bearing on whether or not the button appears?

[Aslena]

Everything is showing the correct media lable of "Share" and all of the other file information is correct.

On my main pc all of the movies are always playable at any time, but on the laptops sometimes they are and sometimes they are grayed out and after 30 seconds up to a couple min it will turn green again and I can click it to play the video.

As far as I can tell other connections don't make a difference. I did a test a bit ago and I turned off PVD on my main pc (I usually leave it running all the time) and it didn't seem to matter either way. I also rarely have more than one of the laptops on at a time so that shouldn't be causing an issue.

I think I'll try hooking up one of the laptops via cable instead of wireless and see if that fixes the problem. If it does I'll just have to run some cables. I'm probably better off doing that anyway in the long run because of how much faster it is. I'll let you know if it does fix the problem.

[Aslena]

Plugging the laptop in via network cable and turning off the wireless does seem to keep the play button green all of the time instead of graying out and becoming un-usable. I suppose I will go ahead and run some cables to where my laptops sit.

It's still odd that this would make any difference, unless PVD does some type of media refresh every so often.

[rick.ca]

It's still odd that this would make any difference, unless PVD does some type of media refresh every so often.

It does seem odd. I doubt it's refreshing media, but maybe it's recording the fact "Share" is a network resource and checking whether it's available. I'm guessing (wildly) it might do that to avoid the even odder behaviour of asking you to insert disc "Share" should you attempt to play something when the drive is off-line.

When Play is greyed-out, is Re-read file information available? If so, does it work? Are you able to see "Share" in a file add dialog (e.g., for adding files to File path)?

[nostra]

PVD does indeed check if media is available for playing every time you select a movie. It should work OK in most cases, but AFAIK there are some general problems with NAS. Most probably you need to access the files from windows explorer first, before they will be available for PVD.

[Aslena]

ok so I have actually fixed the issue without running cables and just thought I'd let you all know what I did in case anyone else needed to know.

From what nostra said about NAS having issues sometimes I got to looking and it seems that when the laptops would boot up they would try to connect to the NAS before the wireless network was actually finished connecting which caused it to not be able to see the share and not have the play button for me.

I fixed the problem by making a .bat file with the following in it to start PVD with instead of the default icon. Basically it just re-adds the network share to my computer again anytime I start PVD so that everything shows up properly.

net use x: \\FREENAS\share
Start "" /MAX "C:\Program Files (x86)\Personal Video Database\viddb.exe"

Explination of what it does:
FIRST LINE
net use  -  the command to map a network drive in windows
X: -  The Drive Letter I use for the share
\\FreeNAS\share  - The network path to the share where my movies are

SECOND LINE
Start  -  tells windows to start a program
''"   -  anything inside the quotes would be a title for the program being opened in this case it is unused but has to be there
/MAX  -  tells it to start the program maximized
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Personal Video Database\viddb.exe"  -  the path that I have PVD installed to

Thanks to everyone for your help

[rick.ca]

Thanks for the report.

[nostra]

Great idea with the bat file. It will certainly be very helpful for other users with NAS.

[lungnut]

PVD does indeed check if media is available for playing every time you select a movie. It should work OK in most cases, but AFAIK there are some general problems with NAS. Most probably you need to access the files from windows explorer first, before they will be available for PVD.

(Sorry for hijacking the thread)

Is there any way to disable this "check for media availability" when selecting a movie? My problem is that I have my movies stored across 12 hard drives in my server box and PVD is waking up these drives when it checks to see if the media is online. This causes two problems: 1) There is a delay of several seconds within PVD as the hard drive wakes up, and 2) The whole point of having my drives go to sleep when not being used is compromised by PVD unnecessarily waking them up. I would like if I could have it access the media file only if I select "play".

Thanks...

[nostra]

No, but I'll add this to my TODO list