TIP: How to organize downloads and How to paste full file names into Lundman shell

[an1m8]

Here's a few tips I thought I would share describing how I organize a large collection of TV shows downloaded from torrents such that I can browse them easily from my armchair using the remote. The method also allows me to "delete" ones I've watched without actually deleting the downloaded file so it can carry on being seeded. The method does not require duplicating the file. I'll describe how I did it on the a100 and how I had to adapt it to work on the A200/C200.

I had an a100 that I used Transmission for downloading British TV shows (I'm an ex pat living in US).

I has a neat little system going to keep track of what shows I'd watched and allow easy armchair browsing of the shows.
- Torrents would download to /share/Download
- In /share/Active I created a folder hierarchy of the show names and seasons.
- In the seasons folders I'd create file links to the individual episodes in the download folder. The file link could have any name so long as it has the same extension as the file you are linking to (so I would typically just use e.g. e01.mkv or e01.avi for episode 1).

To watch a show on the A100 I'd just browse down the Active folder hierarchy and play the link. When I'd finished watching I could just delete the link (or a folder if I'd watched the whole season) using the Delete button on the remote. The actual file in the /share/Download folder would be unaffected so could carry on seeding.

To create the links I was using Telnet from my PC and the BusyBox shell, then just use the 'ln' command. This was made fairly painless by the use of the Tab key to auto-complete folder and file names after I'd typed in the first few characters. This was a god send due to the sometimes very lengthy folder and file names that cappers often give their torrents.

So this was all working great - but recently my hard drive began to show signs of failure so I decided to upgrade my whole system to an A200.

Having set up my A200 a few days ago I was very dismayed to learn that it did not support Telnet. A little searching in these excellent forums and I found the closest you could get is to install the Lundman Shell and BusyBox on the A200 and then connect to it using netcat on the PC.

So I tried this out and was relieved to find that it worked. However, it does not support the use of Tab to auto-complete. So after scratching my head a little and doing some research on the web I found this pretty neat solution:

- Install Ninotech Path Copy 4.0 from http://download.cnet.com/Path-Copy/3000-...6463.html.
- Create a network share on the PC to /share on the A200 (I called mine P: ). You'll need to set the login credentials for the share as appropriate.
- Now using Explorer on the PC browse to the file you are trying to ln to.
- Right click on the file - you should see a new option called 'Copy Path', click this.
- The first time only you'll have to set up a custom copy. Go into settings and enable the checkbox. Then go to the Copy method 1 tab, call it something like 'Popcorn Hour', select 'Long Path', select 'Backslashes to forward slashes', select 'Enclose in quotation marks', select 'No change' for 'Change capitalization'. In the 'Replace text' enter 'P:' (or what ever drive letter you mapped it to) for 'Find what' and '/share' as the 'Replace with'. Apply the new settings.
- Select the Popcorn Hour copy method.
- Now you can just paste into the netcat window (right click the window and select paste), and voila, you will have the full path name for the file in A200 local format!
- Note that in order to be able to paste into the window you must have called netcat from a cmd shell rather than just running nc.exe direct from windows. e.g. use a shortcut like this to start a cmd shell and launch netcat (you'll need to replace the IP adress with the IP address of your unit):
C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C nc.exe 192.168.1.99 2222
Then type in sh to launch the shell.

Hope this is useful!