WDTV Live Plus Playlists and Associated Tricks
I have searched on the topic of hiding files at length before and did not found anything on it, so it is important to do a write up on what I found.After you finish reading this, using your will be able WDTV Live Plus, (probably other WDTV Devices as well) you will be able to hide files and folders. I have mine set up using the WDLXTV firmware with my NAS, which contains all of my media, remotely mounted as a local drive using the XMOUNT command. All of my media is accessed through Video -> Local Drives.
Hiding Folders
This trick will allow you to have folders in a structure that will not show up when browsing the parent directory that your hidden folders live in, from the WDTV Live browsing interface. We ALL have those folders containing... questionable... media that we don't want to put out there in plain sight for others' casual viewing. I discovered a while back that if you append a period to the front of the target folder's name, the WDTV Live will not display it at all, but you can still keep it organized in the same folder structure as the rest of your media folders.The Windows UI will not let you add a period to the front of a file name, so I had to get creative here. Open a command line, and CD to the appropriate parent folder and use the Windows REN command on the folder we want to hide.
 |
| Windows REN command |
Now the folder will not be displayed through the WD TV Live video folder listings. "How does it help if I can't get to it?", you ask. Well you can get to it! First you create a normal subfolder inside of your hidden folder. We will call it "Foo". Inside of Foo is where your media files will live. Create a new playlist, (For NAS devices, relative addressing works a little better than absolute addressing) and add the folder Foo to it. Put your playlist in some inconspicuous place, such a sorting directory under a sorting name that only you will know its true purpose. For Example, you have a normal folder called -Sorting- in your main media folder, which has underneath it multiple playlist files pointing to all of your media files sorted alphabetically. Under the 'X.m3u' playlist, you could add a pointer to your Foo file, and be able to get to Foo from there.
Hiding Files
One problem I ran into while incorporating playlists into my setup was that the WDTV would show folders containing exclusively playlist files one time after startup, but if you backed out to the main menu and then tried to view the playlist folder again, it wouldn't be displayed. This drove me crazy for a long time. I found that if you had a file with a video extension present in the folder, this behavior would not occur.However, this was an annoying solution because at the end of your playlists, you had some random "z.m2ts" file that didn't do anything, but was displayed anyway. I discovered last night, that if you change the filename to "..m2ts", you get the benefit of both of these tricks. Your playlist folders will not be hidden if you back out to the main menu and then reopen the media folder (because you DO still have a file with a video file extension present, so the parent folder will still be displayed), AND the file itself isn't displayed in the WDTV Live interface with the rest of your playlists.
After I made this realization last night, I had a face-palm moment because it had taken me two years to figure out this trick.
I hope this helps some of you folks who might be searching for ways to do similar things. Thanks for visiting!
