My Software
In my spare time I enjoy writing software for myself and others, usually in the form of useful utilities.
Here I'm making them available to you should you find them interesting or somehow useful.
Media Center File Mover v1.0 (172KB - 01/10/10)
- Windows Media Center 7 has a nasty little bug when you have a system setup to record TV
and then use another Media Center 7 system to monitor that recording folder over the network.
If the 2nd system is running the Media Center UI when new shows are recorded on
the first system they will show up in the 2nd system with the raw filename and with
no description. This is an incredibly frustrating bug that somehow got through all of the
Windows 7 testing.
The workaround is to setup a second folder on the system that is recording TV and copy
newly recorded shows to that folder after recording is complete. That second folder must
be shared on the network and the 2nd system should monitor that folder instead of the
true recording folder. The question is how do you automatically copy files from one folder
to another. While there are various methods out there they all have their flaws. To resolve
this I created a simple app that will work for just this scenario.
MceFileMover copies files from one folder to another, you specify the two folders. By default
it tries once a minute but you can configure the interval. By default it only copies files with a
wtv extension, but again you can configure it by specifying as many extension names as you like
separated by semicolons. Files for shows currently being recorded will not copy until they have
completed recording. MceFileMover gracefully handles all sorts of errors in copying so you don't
need to worry about it.
A feature I use a lot that is broken by this workaround is series limits. If you have series setup to only keep a
specific number of episodes Media Center can no longer track them correctly since we are copying
files to another folder. MceFileMover can handle this as well. You can enter as many series names
as you want along with the number of most recent shows to keep and it will remove older ones as needed.
To start using MceFileMover just download the zip file and unzip the single exe wherever you like.
Setup that exe to run at system startup under the account you login as when running Media Center
(simply use the Startup folder in the Start menu). Now run it manually the first time and click Settings.
Choose the source and destination folders (Source being the true Recording TV folder and Destination
being the new share you have setup as described above). Add any other file types you want to copy by
separating them with semicolons (though generally you don't need to) and change the copy interval if you like.
Finally, add any series limits you want then click OK to save the settings and start the process. Note, don't exit
out of the main window as that closes MceFileMover. You can minimize it if you don't want to see the details.
That's it. Now just leave MceFileMover running all the time and you'll see in the main window details of
what it does. Simple, easy, done. Now just wait for Microsoft to fix this problem and we can undo all of
this silly workaround.
MceFileMover requires the .NET Framework version 3.5. You can find it
here if you don't already have it, or just visit Windows Update for automatic installation. Click on the picture below for a larger screenshot
of MceFileMover.
