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[benn600]

I am storing my television, internet video, and movies on one drive at the moment.  It looks like I may be running out in a short while, however.  Therefore, I need to split the files up since I don't want to/can't do raid.

My video folder contains Television, Internet, and Movies folders.  The movies part is the largest and it may not fit on one drive.  The other two folders are considerably smaller, however.  What I'd like to know is if anyone uses a top level descriptor that would break up their movie collection?  I wouldn't care if it was broken up into 2 or 10 categories--almost like genre.  But, finding a descriptor for every movie would require that it be 99% obvious because otherwise, finding a movie under the folders would be a pain.

[jgreen]

Well, "genre" is my idea of a top-level descriptor, although it can be subjective.  "Director" is usually absolute and somewhat informative from a style standpoint.  You might try "decade released" as a quick-and-easy paradigm.  In the old days (prior to the new millenium) "studio (distributor)" was a great indicator of the style--Para, Uni, Warners all put out their own distinctive type of flix.

Um, why would "finding a movie under the folders" be a pain?  Have you tried jriver's Media Center?  This great program allows you to organize media without regard to location or all those messy folders.

[hit_ny]

I'd say go with the alphabet at the file/dir level.

That way if certain folders get to big, you an always move to diff paritions.

[benn600]

Good idea: alphabetical will work.  That is an instantly known method for categorizing.

Two reasons I need to categorize by letter:
1. My Xbox media center is only capable of browsing by folders, so I want everything very easy to find and get to.
2. I need a way to break up the files on two drives and then mount it as an empty folder.

[dlone]

Another idea for you

Make as many library fields as you need
eg I have a library field called 'Catagory' in the 'General' section
'Data Type' = List
'Edit type' = Standard
'Values' = Audiobook;Compilations;Downloaded;Music;Oldies

Then I made 6 view schemes - one for each of the catagories plus one for 'Unassigned'

It gets around all the 'what drive is it on questions', seperates all the mulltiple artist compilations from real albums and lets you split things up into etc easily managable chunks etc

An extra benefit it that all the newely imported stuff goes straight into the 'Unassigned' catagory, and you can sort it at your leisure

You could do the same for the different kind of video files you have - it's worked great for me with both video and audio (audiobooks were a pain to set up - author>series>book number etc but you only have to do it once and after that it's all hunky dory - OT and what a great album that was)

[glynor]

I just use Genre...

I use the following:

TV Shows
Animation
Movies
Comedy
Music Video
Misc

(and then I have a bunch of "video editing" and "work" related categories that aren't directly related to your issue)

You could just as easily use Category as someone else suggested.  I considered doing this, as I may someday actually categorize my Movies and other video into true "Genres" (like Suspense, Horror, Comedy, etc), but I just use Genre for now.  If I ever do bother to sub-categorize, the Move/Copy fields tool is good enough to move the data over to a "real" category field I suppose...

Of course, I do have a 1 TB RAID5 volume that is used for all my "library" video (as opposed to the 350 GB BeyondTV "DVR" drive), so my categorizations are purely for MC organizational purposes.  They still do come in handy when I'm offloading things I've watched (and aren't likely to do again anytime soon) onto DVD-Rs.  You wouldn't really want to burn off some random movie with an episode of CSI or Mork and Mindy...  If you're serious about storing video though, I highly recommend you reconsider the RAID.  It doesn't eliminate all risk, but it certainly mitigates some of it.  And it just makes working with, and storing, the video files so much simpler and "cleaner".