External Video Folders

[DJ Max]

Is anyone using video folders that are somewhere else on their home network? I'm having a problem that Snapstream says isn't a problem, but apparently it is and therefore, will never be fixed. I'm just wondering how anyone else might be dealing with it. I have two copies of BTV. One is on my main computer that does all the recordings. Then I move them to a video folder on my laptop and use the second copy of BTV to ShowSqueeze after using VideoRedo to trim movies and cut out commercials from TV shows.

The problem starts when one of the hard drives on my laptop is removed from the network. Either the computer crashes or for some reason, the sharing is removed from the folder. One drive is a USB/Firewire drive and the other is a Drobo. Last night, my laptop was acting up, so I removed both drives to see if I could figure out what was happening. Ever since then, my main BTV wouldn't work. It would tell me it couldn't access the port (8129 or whatever) and the scheduling service was restarted. From previous experience, I knew it was due to the external folders being gone, so I plugged in the drives again, but the folders weren't shared. By the time I realized that, I had already removed those folders from the main BTV. After I made sure they were shared again and the main computer could access them, I added those folders to BTV again, but the Web Admin just kept saying it was scanniing the folders, but there was never any progress and I went back to having the problems with the port access and the scheduling service being restarted. There's no way to get BTV to stop scanning, but it doesn't matter because once that started, I couldn't get into the Web Admin again. That's when I took a chance and searched for the file that holds the Video Folder info and moved it to my desktop and hoped BTV would start again. It did, so I added some local video folders and decided I can't take a chance on using external folders anymore.

Now, the question. Is it better to map the external folders and use that or do it through My Network? I'm sure neither way would help with this issue that "doesn't exist", but I just wondered how other people are doing it. If anyone knows how to fix the other problem, please let me know. So far, the only solution is to use the second copy of BTV to move the files over, but the other way I had it set up was great because the default ShowSqueeze setting on the first copy was to just move the shows over and the second one was set up to transcode to Apple TV automatically after I removed the commercials and stuff. I am happy to see something has changed and now files transcoded by BTV will now play on the PS3. I'm not sure if it was a change in the PS3 or in BTV, but something has changed somewhere. Now if I could figure out a solution to this external folders problem, I'll be thrilled.