Tip for organizing my library/archive of old TV shows?

[cineburk]

I have several DVD sets of TV shows that I would like to make accessible on my SageTV box. I would like to convert them to DIVX,and allow them to be accessed via SageTV.

Has anyone done this, and if so, how is the interface? I expect to have about 40-50 episodes to begin, with that increasing to 100-200+ episodes as I add storage space.

If I load them through the Media Center, will they just load in one folder, listed alphabetically (as my current imported videos are)? This would be very unweildly for so many programs. Plus, it would be great to have information for what I have watched.

Can SageTV organize them into subgroups and display information? Or is there another program or add-on that can do this?

[popechild]

Not sure if this'll exactly be what you're looking for, but it will at least give you some ideas of ways you can segregate content within Sage. In My Videos (I'm using SageMC, so hopefully it treats folders the same way as regular Sage, I've never really used the standard STV), I have content that I wanted to put in distinct categories such as "DVDs", "Internet Videos", and "Downloaded TV". I didn't want them all to be mixed into one huge group. So I created folders called D:\Ripped DVDs\DVDs, D:\Downloaded TV\TV, and D:\Internet Videos\Videos. Then I put the content into the lowest level folders and I pointed Sage to look for videos in the "higher" level folders (D:\Ripped DVDs, D:\Downloaded TV, D:\Internet Videos). I could have done without separating them into distinct higher level videos in Windows, but wanted them that way for organizational reasons.

Now Sage reads the higher level folders and sees the lower level folders and puts those folders into the video interface, so I see 3 folders in My Videos (DVDs, TV, Videos).

That gives me a good amount of organization at that level. You can do the same thing by the way at lower levels. For instance, within TV you could make multiple folders called "Seinfeld", "Friends", etc and put all your individual episodes or disc rips in those.

Another nice thing to note if you need to separate the content onto multiple drives, as long as you name the folders the same thing Sage will join them together within the interface. For example, I have DVDs on D:\Ripped DVDs\DVDs and also E:\Temporary DVDs\DVDs, but since I have Sage pointed to D:\Ripped DVDs and E:\Temporary DVDs, all Sage sees within both locations is a folder named "DVDs" and it puts them all together in the "DVDs" folder in My Videos.

Hope that gives you some ideas...

[cineburk]

Thanks! I'll try it out and see if it works.