Asustor NAS folder indexing, sorting etc.

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ddutoit777
Posts: 2
youtube meble na wymiar Warszawa
Joined: Sat Mar 10, 2018 4:36 pm

Asustor NAS folder indexing, sorting etc.

Post by ddutoit777 »

Hi all,

I have an Asustor T1002 server and use a TV on the same network to stream from.

I noticed that the file indexing is a bit weird, for instance if I have files marked as "episode 1" to "episode 20" it will order the files as "Episode 1", "Episode 10", "Episode 2" etc. which is not right.

Furthermore it just creates all these unnecessary folders inbetween that I don't really want or need i.e. videos, pictures etc. when I literally just want to show the files that are there as I set them up.

Is there a way to clean all this up and ensure that it sorts the files correctly?
MikeG.6.5
Posts: 917
Joined: Fri May 15, 2015 1:56 am

Re: Asustor NAS folder indexing, sorting etc.

Post by MikeG.6.5 »

You don't say which app suite you are using to view the media. but I can tell you from first hand experience that the issue with name sorting is just as likely the way your TV handles your naming convention.

Try naming the files like this:
showname - S##E##.ext

For example:
Between - S01E01.mp4

See if renaming the shows has an affect on how they are sorted.

Another way around this would be to use a streaming suite for viewing the shows. Emby or Plex could work just as well for you as your current method, and since both of these suites are fully supported suites by a dedicated 3rd party team, getting them to work is fairly straight forward. Of course both of these suites have their own naming conventions you should try to adhere to. (Otherwise you are likely to have a bunch of other problems along the way.)

I have some tips in my signature for optimizing media, including naming conventions, which might help you out a bit.
Antonios
Posts: 82
Joined: Tue Jun 27, 2017 1:05 pm

Re: Asustor NAS folder indexing, sorting etc.

Post by Antonios »

NAS does 'simple' sorting and not 'logical' sorting. Logical is what we humans are used to.

Simple sorting is done by comparing each character's ASCII hex value in the order these characters appear in any given string, does not distinguish between numeric characters or letters or whatever, each ASCII character has a hex value and an order of appearance, these are the only criteria, so obviously you get this

1<10<2<20<3

As was pointed out, you can work around this by forcing fixed length strings for numbers using leading zeros since we are talking integers here, then 'simple' sorting yields same results as 'logical' sorting.

01<02<03<04<10

or 001<002<003<010<100 etc

Just my 2c.
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