I would use Channels for all my media needs, but when I load my local library onto it, I can't get all those movies to show up in separate folders like Plex does. They are all loaded into just one section: "Movies". I get the icon for "folders", but when I click on it nothing happens.
Try creating folders under your local import folder, i.e., /ImportMovies/Thrillers/moviename.mp4. Then the Folders section should work. I found that the foiders could not contain spaces so "Thrillers One" did not work, but ThrillersTwo did. Try a few to see the results.
Can you give more details on this?
Example: I have many categories of movies and tv shows in separate folders on drives in my server. I imported 2 of those folders, each containing about 500 movies into "local content" in channels. They show up as they are supposed to under movie sources as D:\ Film Noir and D:\Sci-Fi. Now, when I want to access a particular movie, I find no separate folders for the 2 categories I loaded. Instead, all the movies from those 2 categories are simply mixed together along with the DVR movies I recorded on channels under "movies" in the library. The movies tab therefore has about 1200 movies in total[DVR, Sci-Fi and Film Noir] all mixed together in no random order. Now, when I access the channels app from one of my devices, and click "movies" in the left hand menu, I have to scroll forever to find a particular movie. If I therefore loaded all my other movie categories in the same manner, I would have a situation that would be untenable. There is a "folder" option to click on my devices when I click "more", but nothing happens on the click, as I assume it's supposed to show the two separate folders with the various movies split up just like on my server's drives. I have the latest version of Channels, as i update every time it available. Hope this explains the problem in better detail.
The reason you are not seeing them under the "Folder" view is that you are using too few levels.
To get better results, you would need something like:
Movies
|
+- FilmNoir
|
+- SciFi
Then you add the Movies folder under Local Content, rather than each individual folder.
Channels wasn’t really designed to be a file system browser. It indexes your movies for you and provides numerous ways to browse based on that metadata.
For example, you can browse by genre, or decade, when movies were added to your library, when they were released, or by their rating. So, you aren’t really stuck browsing movies in a single list.
That being said, we did add rudimentary support for browsing by folder for those that really want it. But like what @racameron said, your imported directories have no folders in them.
You would need to import a root directory, that has subdirectories in them. According to Channels, your movies aren’t in folders, as you imported directories with movies in them.
I'm going to try this method. I'm presently copying my movie folders into a main folder on another drive[need space]. Then I will import the main folder. This makes sense to me and should work. Thanks for all your help.
I tried this. Didn't work. I copied 2 folders of movies to a main folder, and then loaded that main folder into "local content". The main folder shows up as it should in the settings, and the scan begins. Eventually it shows "idle" and all the movies do indeed show up in "movies" and are accessible to play. But, as before they are all mixed up[the 2 sub folders of movies]. When I use the channels app on my android device, under movies there is an option to click on decades, genre, and folder. When I click on "folder" up pops a dialogue that says "choose folder". When I click that option, nothing happens, in other words: "dead".
In the initial setup of the main folder in settings, when I choose that folder to install, the 2 sub folders do show up in the dialogue[window pane] as separate folders before I click install.
This isn't a deal breaker for me, however, because the Plex app handles the library situation perfectly well-the way I want. Channels is superior to Plex in all other respects and will continue to be my main source of tv entertainment.
Please submit diagnostics from your Channels DVR Server web admin under Support > Troubleshooting