Comments on: Reindexing Media Center Library

By: iTunes Album gesplittet – tech-island.com

iTunes Album gesplittet – tech-island.com — Sun, 17 Jan 2016 18:46:31 +0000

[…] Krunk4Ever: Reindexing Media Center Library […]

By: Putz

Putz — Mon, 02 Mar 2015 07:03:39 +0000

In reply to bardy.

That is not the problem……..this is about the duplicated folder pointers

By: bardy

bardy — Fri, 10 Oct 2014 05:48:25 +0000

Use DuplicateFilesDeleter!

By: Maarten de Gouw

Maarten de Gouw — Thu, 20 Feb 2014 16:27:24 +0000

After spending hours and almost throwing pc trough the window, I found this page… Thank you very much!!! Everything works now!

By: Jack

Jack — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 03:27:09 +0000

Unfortunately, none of this worked for me. Windows 7.
Also, how do i get WMC to recognize my movies in “Folders” as opposed to only in “Date Taken”??

By: xmnboy

xmnboy — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 19:05:39 +0000

In reply to Krunk.

Thanks for the suggestion. I recently had to rebuild my WHS 2011 machine because the boot partition failed (on a RAID drive — what luck!).

In the process of rebuilding the machine I’ve found that the fundamental problem I was having with the media library not getting updated properly has to do with getting the Media Center software to recognize additions/deletions to the various media library folders. It turns out that since WHS is normally configured as a file server, it only watches for changes to network shares — meaning it does not watch for file additions/deletions on the internal drives (e.g., D:\ServerFolders\*), rather only to the network file access events (e.g., \\whs-server\music\*).

So, if you’ve reconfigured the WHS machine to allow using it as an app server as well as a file server, as I have, and you are logged into the machine as a local user, the simplest way to get the machine to recognized additions/deletions to the media directories is to copy those files to the UNC share, not to the internal drive. In other words, if I have an MP3 that I wish to add to the music library, rather than copying it to D:\ServerFolders\Music\Artist\Album\song.mp3 you need to copy it to \\whs-server\Music\Artist\Album\song.mp3 (where “whs-server” is the network hostname of your WHS 2011 machine). It’s a round-a-bout way to get copy files into media directories, especially if all you’re doing is moving them around on the server or updating/modifying them on the server, but it does work.

Once you get that down things work great! You may still have to kill the MediaStreamingProvider.exe service occassionally to effect a larger update, but for small stuff this works.

The alternative approach is to simply kill the MediaStreamingProvider.exe service permanently and configure Windows Media Player under one of the users to stream media, as you would on any standard Windows machine. This makes it easier to manage the library and update tags, etc.

By: Jason

Jason — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 15:58:36 +0000

Thanks so much for the wonderful information. It works for Windows 7 as well. 🙂

By: Pete Long

Pete Long — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 13:51:27 +0000

Here's some more information that might be helpfull, Force Media Center to Update its Libraries Pete PeteNetLive

By: Krunk

Krunk — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 08:06:50 +0000

In reply to xmnboy.

Sorry, but I left Microsoft awhile back and haven’t really played with WHS 2011 enough to be able to help you. But a pointer that may help you:

The executable you’re trying to kill may be a service and that’s why it’s auto restarting. If you go into Services (services.msc), try to find it there and see if you can stop it.

Best of luck!

By: xmnboy

xmnboy — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 05:09:42 +0000

Discovered a few more tidbits… The appropriate user, I believe, is “MediaStreamingAdmin” — but I can’t delete the files in the directory you advise because they are “in use” by some process. When I try to kill the only process owned by “MediaStreamingAdmin” (which is called “MediaStreamingProvider.exe”) it immediately restarts, so I can’t get rid of the files (I’m assuming this is the owner of the resources that is causing my attempts to delete to fail).

There’s also a registry key named “MediaLibraryCreateNewDatabase” that I thought might allow me to force a rebuild, but I can’t modify that, either! I’m doing all of this logged in as Administrator on the machine, to no avail…

Please contact the internal Media Center folks who put together the bits for WHS 2011 for a few clues, this has been very frustrating trying to get the corrupted database fixed.

Thanks in advance…