I have transitioned from a PIVIOS AIOS box to a home build HTPC with WMC and Plex and am liking it very much...
One of the things I liked about the AIOS set up, that I am not so sure about with Plex is the metadata.
On the AIOS, you use Thumbgen to create the art, posters, fanart, and NFO files (that store such things as movie name, description, year, director, etc.
(each movie goes into it own folder)
The nice thing about this is you can edit the NFO file and customize the content, and since all of this information is in the folder with the movie. Once you have things they way you like it, you can rescan it any time to update the metadata (in this case update the posters used by AIOS) and you don't need to worry about it being overwritten or changed because an agent was changed.
So.... My suggestion would be to decentralize the metadata from the database and Plex folders
- fanart, posters go into folder with movie
- metadata details (desc, summary, year, collection, genre, director, actors) go into NFO file (XML) in the folder with each movie.
Now, I can have a static collection of information about the movie... If my media server dies (PMS) I just reinstall and point at the folders, and it scans everything back in just as I want it. I can also upgrade to a new machine by simply copying all of the folders to the new machine and scanning them. No need to have tro 'tune' everything after a deep scan, etc.
thoughts?
