Recorded TV dir. junction allows permanent view change!

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Dan Harkless

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Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2017 11:11 am
Location: Orange County, California

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Recorded TV dir. junction allows permanent view change!

#1

Post by Dan Harkless » Tue Aug 08, 2017 1:06 pm

I just wanted to share a very happy discovery I made today. It's always annoyed me that (at least on Windows 7), the Recorded TV folder(s) are treated specially, and if you change the view of them in Windows Explorer (AKA File Explorer in Win8/10), e.g. to use the Details view, and perhaps display additional metadata columns, it only lasts as long as your Explorer is in that directory. Click out and back in, and your view changes are irritatingly gone.

However, today, while exploring the additional columns that get populated for .wtv files, it occurred to me that if this special-casing were being done by pathname, then making a directory junction to the Recorded TV directory should allow for a secondary view option which remembers its settings. I tested it out, and it does indeed work! I right-clicked on Command Prompt to run it as an Administrator (if you've changed the permissions on the top level of your drive, that may not be necessary), then went to my Recorded TV drives in turn and did mklink /j "Recorded TV (modifiable view junction)" "Recorded TV". (Doing 'mklink /d' to create a symbolic link would also work, but only on your local machine, not when viewing it over a network share.)

Then if you go to your "Recorded TV (modifiable view junction)" directory in Explorer and make view changes, they will be preserved next time you click on the pseudo-folder (and I've confirmed that this also holds true across login sessions). Click back on the original Recorded TV directory and you'll see it's still in the default "Large icons" view (which is actually handy, since you can always quickly flip between browsing your shows visually or textually), and if you go to Details view, you'll see that it just has the minimal Name, Date, Type, Size, and Length columns (or perhaps more, if you've used Explorer's Tools... Folder options... View... Apply to Folders to change the default view of folders that have "Optimize this folder for: Video" on the "Customize" tab of their Properties; you may also have changed the default view mode from "Large icons" that way).

For my Recorded TV (modifiable view junction) directories, I ended up going with the following columns (in the given order). Since I've been without cable for a couple of years, my shows all date from before the Rovi guide data change, so probably a lot of these will be blank with their data, though hopefully using EPG123 and the Gracenote data would see most or all of them (and perhaps additional ones, e.g. "Parental rating reason") filled in again. (Also not sure if using different cable providers or over-the-air ATSC affects any of this metadata.)
  • Name
  • Title
  • Episode name
  • Broadcast date
  • Date created
  • Date modified
  • Program description
  • Length
  • Size
  • Station call sign
  • Station name
  • Channel number
  • Genre
  • Rerun
  • Closed captioning
  • SAP
  • Protected
  • Parent rating
  • Date accessed
  • Date released
  • Attributes
  • Owner
  • Type
I kept "Date released" just as a curio — just one show I have recorded has the date (well, the year) filled in for that, the TV movie "An Adventure in Space and Time" on BBC America. All the rest have a 0 in that field. I should also note that I use Classic Shell, but I don't think any of the UI changes it makes to Windows Explorer affect the above.

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Crash2009

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Joined: Thu May 17, 2012 12:38 am
Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan

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#2

Post by Crash2009 » Wed Aug 09, 2017 4:19 am

Thanks Dan, ill have to come back to this one when i have time to play with it.

I don't remember how I may have trick-#$%@&* mine. "Protected" is a column I always add. After closing explorer, that change sticks for me.

I wonder if the number of columns is limited. Suppose I could select all as a test.

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