Choosing my media server software

[mabel]

I have a question about media servers; it's a bit technical, I'm afraid. As I understand it, one of the main functions of a media server is to gather the metadata from media files and put them in a database. Evidently, the first time the program runs it has to scan all media files. However, from then on it can/could rely on the OS to signal any changes (deletions, additions, alterations). That was the way my now defunct NAS worked: updates to the database were virtually instantaneous. But now I want to use a windows10 desktop as media server and notice that in some cases I have to set how often the files are scanned for changes. 'Scanning' to detect changes doesn't seem very efficient to me. So my question is: are not there media server programs around which do not have to scan all the time, but instead rely on the OS to signal changes?
BTW, Windows Explorer seems to work that way. Does Windows Media Player (which can act as a media server too) use that information?           

 

[ElviaCaprice]

First of all, I would never use Windows Media Player.  Get something like JRiver for media playback.  There you can set the software to scan as you see fit.  I like to manually command JRiver to do so.

[mabel]

On 30-9-2017 at 7:17 PM, ElviaCaprice said:

First of all, I would never use Windows Media Player.  Get something like JRiver for media playback.  There you can set the software to scan as you see fit.  I like to manually command JRiver to do so.

My question was not about playback but media servers.
JRiver does a lot of scanning; I was hoping to find a media server which does NOT do that.
Mabel

 

[jcn3]

4 hours ago, mabel said:

My question was not about playback but media servers.
JRiver does a lot of scanning; I was hoping to find a media server which does NOT do that.
Mabel

 

You can set JRiver to do scanning or not - very easy to choose how it behaves

[mabel]

@jcn3: Ah, I didn't realise that. I'll give JRiver one more try, then.

[fragoulisnaval]

Alternatively, you can use MUSIChi software suite a try

[Dan Gravell]

On 30/09/2017 at 1:58 PM, mabel said:

So my question is: are not there media server programs around which do not have to scan all the time, but instead rely on the OS to signal changes?

 

You're right, it's normally pretty trivial to implement this. On Windows, the ReadDirectoryChangesW API does the job, on Linux (and probably your old NAS) it's inotify.

 

Don't have any suggestions for _players_ for you though, sorry!