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+---- Thread: Help me to understand path substitution (/showthread.php?tid=354532)
Help me to understand path substitution - dasM - 2020-05-18
I recently switched my Kodi device from a Vero 4K with OSMC to a Odroid N2 with CoreElec and as I ported the databases I (despite reading most of the threads to this topic) still have some general lack of understanding what consequences the usage of path substitutions would have for me.
On my old device all mounts were stored under /mnt/..., so in my media databases the path to any media file is e.g. "/mnt/movies/my movie.mkv". After switching the devices I had the problem that OpenElec only allows mounts under /storage, not under /mnt, so here path substitutions come into play. I set up in advancedsettings.xml:
Code:
<pathsubstitution>
<substitute>
<from>/mnt/</from>
<to>/storage/</to>
</substitute>
</pathsubstitution>
The thing I still don't get is how to setup my library-sources in my new device-installation. To me there are two (and a half) scenarios:
1) I set up my sources to the real (new) path /storage/... - this would lead new media files being added with their real path /storage/... into the database, wouldn't it? So after a while I'd have some path fragmentation in my databases, some media would still link to /mnt/... and some media would link to /storage/...
But that's not the only caveat here. What would happen if I start a library scan in this scenario? To my understanding all media under the real sorce-path /storage/... would be added again into the library, because the parser does not know that this media file is already linked to by path substitutions. Or am I too concerned here?
2) To avoid media-duplicate-trouble of scenario 1, the second scenario would be to manually edit sources.xml and set library-paths back to /mnt/... - would this work at all? In The wiki there is said "Note: Path substition for "sources" and profiles is broken, and will NOT be fixed." - what does that mean in detail? What is broken? And - if it would work at all - would new files in this scenario being added with /mnt/... as their paths or would this lead to path-fragmentation again?
2 1/2) The third alternative is a rather extreme one: I could manually open the database files in an SQLite Manager and update all the paths from /mnt to /storage and set up the /storage-folders as sources.
My questions: do I understand everything correctly? I would clearly prefer scenario 2 as I am really concerned about media duplication and path-fragmentation in scenario 1 - so, could anyone describe the consequences in detail please? Thank you