Problems and Questions Organizing Video Clips

[Shock]

I am challenged in getting my videos organzied by genre in Mezzmo. I have many different files in many different file formats on four different hard drives. From my research, it appears some file types support adding metadata to the file which I presume Mezzmo would read - but not all file types: avi's for instance. Here's what appear to be my options:

1.) Copy folder structures from hard drive to Mezzmo. Problem with this is that I will have duplicate genre folders because I have video files on multiple hard drives.

2.) Right click each one of 1,500 video files in Mezzmo and add genre information to it. Problems with this appear to be a.) video genres are not listed in the drop down menu. The genres listed appear to be taken from my music files. Should I just edit a few of my music files to get video genres added to Mezzmo? For instance, taking a jazz song and changing the genre from Jazz to anime? b.) If this works, I still have the daunting task of manually fixing 1,500+ files one by one

3.) Using smart playlists. The only way I see to get this to work on video files that don't have genre information in the metadata is to use file paths. For instance, organize the files on my hard drives into genre folders and then have Mezzmo look for any video files that have Comedy in the filepath name. I tried doing this, but can't seem to get the files to show up in the smart playlists. Maybe because I'm having to do nested playlists?

Can anyone help me with the best way to get my video files organized?

[Shock]

I have an update on 3.) above. I got the smart playlists to work. It was weird - when I organized my videos into genre folders on my drives, Mezzmo did not update the file paths, in spite of me refreshing the library. I had to uninstall the program, reinstall, redo all my smart playlists and that got it working. It's still a clunky workaround, but I have my video clips organized now. What was I doing wrong that the file paths were not being updated in Mezzmo?

[GliMM]

Hi!

I also have some trouble organizing my video library, but I spent some money on a drive so that I could at least keep them all on a single drive.
But sorting videos in folders structures has some issues of it's own, where to put the Action/Comedy, the Romantic/Comedy's (Yes, I admit i have some of those too) Horror/Adventure and so on.
You get the idea. A perfect solution to this would be to have the possibility to add multiple genre on a video file, it won't solve the folder structure issue (exept to put the file in multiple locations) but im not that keen on spending that ammount of money it would take to have duplicates or even more copies of a single file just to cover all the various genres a movie could belong to. IMDB usually suggests up to four (!) genres.

So I stick to my suggestion posted on the suggestions board. -Multiple Genres- OR as a workaround, the possibility to use the comment field on my smart playlists, then i could add any comment I want and filter by it.

I have also played around using the avi. metadata options, (like id3 tags for mp3's) but I have found it to be too complicated and sometimes even impossible, not many programs supports reading this or even less supports writing to it.

After some discussions i ended up with the only 'working' solution, at least as of today, is to sort the files by year of release.
This covers the various situations but is not optimal.

I would love to hear other suggestions or experiences.
/Richard

[GliMM]

Oh, I forgot to mention another quite tedious solution that also works within mezzmo.
Add your entire media directory to mezzmo as a folder.
Create a Playlist for every Genre that you want. (Could be quite a few, but anyway..)
Use the cool windows feature 'Drag and drop' from your Folder Directory in Mezzmo to the Genre playlist of choice.. here I can drag a file to more than one playlist (Genre) without having multiple copies of the file.
I guess this solution is a lot of work, but hey, what are some hours spent infront of the computer compared to the satisying feeling to once more achive overloard status over your media files! =)

You could last use the playlist sharing permissions feature to the 'folder' to remove this from your device and only keep the playlists (at leat I think so, I havent tried this last step yet).