Thats ok, it doesn't have the ability for any video format anyway, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
OK, I've figured out what was causing my confusion.
It looks like Media Center considers sidecars and tags to be equivalent.
So if the options to write tags are disabled, it won't write sidecars either.
Maybe 6 months or so ago I made some changes to my setup that disabled tag writing by default as it was slowing things down too much when working with lots of files, and I would run "update tags from library" once I had finished making all changes to write them.
I'd have to check the exact conditions but it looks like having the "write file tags…" option disabled in auto-import is preventing sidecars being created, but the "get movie & TV info" option
does write sidecars for those files.
So when I returned to this six months later after upgrading to MC24, checking the disk and seeing that most of my downloaded video library (mostly MP4 from YouTube, Vimeo, Podcasts etc.) was missing sidecars but all of my movie and TV libraries (MKV) did have sidecars, I mistakenly thought that Media Center must have been writing tags to the MP4s and only creating sidecars for the MKVs.
Is there a performance difference between writing sidecars and modifying tags?
Do tag changes require that a file is rewritten vs sidecars which are only a few KB?
If there is a performance difference, it might be preferable to separate the two.
If bitrot is a concern ... why not use ZFS file system that actually prevent this from happening
To start with, a 10Gb network is still too expensive for me to consider moving storage to a networked device.
1Gb is much slower than direct access to the disks. Even 10Gb is slower if I'm accessing many disks at once for tasks other than media playback. I've seen Task Manager's total reported disk activity above 5GB/s (40Gb) during some operations.
