Issues in traversing folders in Philips DVP 5990 ! Please help!

[neo76]

Hi All,

Recently i purchased a Philips DVP 5990 primarily for playing of videos from my Western Digital Passport 500GB USB hard disk.

It does recognise the hard disk folders but only to a certain extent. I see that if the folders are nested quite a lot , like more than 3 or 4 levels then it doesn't recognize the files in those folders.

It recognizes the files in the root folders and about one or two more levels nested but not beyond that. I checked the FAT system of my WD hard disk and it is FAT32. The files that I'm taking about at are DivX video files.

But when I try to simulate the same folder level in a USB stick then it recognizes the file.

Can someone please provide any suggestions how I can make it read files in multilevel folders from the WD hard disk?

Thanks.

[jman98]

By any chance do you have hundreds of files on this disk drive? The reason I am asking is that Philips players have a limit on how many files they can read and it might be a lot less than you'd like. It's something like 620. Maybe if you have a lot of music files to go with your Divx files you are hitting the limit and don't know it. There's no fix for this if this is your problem. The limit is on the total number of files on the drive and putting the files in folders does NOT do anything to get around the limit.

[redwudz]

Deeply nested folders are not a good idea, especially several levels deep. Any particular reason they need to be so buried? The 5990 can use up to 300 folders and 648 files per folder. No reason for deeply nested folders. I wouldn't expect the 5990 to find them. A lot of systems would have the same problem.

[gll99]

The largest drive I've used so far with the 5990 is 320gb. It's split into 2 partitions which show up as usb1 and usb2. Then in each partition there are a number of folders with some having one additional sub folder layer. The "partitions" are divided into 2 major categories of videos but that could be expanded to more partitions ie movies, tv shows, music or even sub categories like "Westerns", Scifi", Musicals etc depending on your personal collection. The player has no problems reading any of the files and it's easy to switch partition with the input selection button on the remote.

If a smaller usb thumb drive with deeper folder layers can be read by the player but not from the hdd then the issue might be memory related. With the hdd containing many more files per layer then the player probably can't keep track of that much information.

This could easily be tested if someone had a fresh disk or partition and created multiple folder layers but with only a few files in each folder. If that worked then it might support my "max memory capacity" theory. Unfortunately the hdd I'm using is packed right up with fresh video we haven't watched yet and I'd hate to have to reload now.

That said, with the option of generating multiple partitions and folders to separate things out, there seems little benefit to nesting folders beyond a level or two.

[jman98]

Deeply nested folders are not a good idea, especially several levels deep. Any particular reason they need to be so buried? The 5990 can use up to 300 folders and 648 files per folder. No reason for deeply nested folders. I wouldn't expect the 5990 to find them. A lot of systems would have the same problem.

We've had other posts in the forums that dispute what you said. I don't own this player so I have no way to test, but it has been reported by owners that the limit of 648 files is for the ENTIRE disk and NOT per folder.

[neo76]

Hi All,

Thanks for the quick response. Here are the details of the drive -

There are in totality around 30,000 odd files & 1800 folders in this entire one partition. All these files or folders are not video files. They are a mix of all music, text and video files.
Any video folder at a given time does not have more than 20 or 30 odd video files. There are only 3 or 4 folders which have around 150-200 video files.

Now, just to give you an example of the problem, I have a divx file in
"L:\BAKUP\Video\ELR\ELR S2"
where L: is my drive and "ELR S2" is the final folder I'm trying to traverse to view a video file inside the folder. When I connect the drive to the dvd player's usb port, it recognizes only until the "ELR" folder and not the next one.

My problem now is I dont have any other spare drive to copy the files and partition the WD USB disk drive. So is there any other way to have the player read the files?

Thanks.

[neo76]

Or is there any other dvd player which does not have this limitation or will be able to read the files irrespective of any folder structure?

I tried using my friends WD HD Media player and it works like a charm reading the WD USB disk drive, but for the WD Media player I need to have a separate video cable going to my TV etc. So that's the reason I was more inclined towards going for a DVD player that does both.

Thanks.

[redwudz]

jman98, I'm going by the information on the Tech Flaws site: http://blog.techflaws.org/2008/11/01/philips-dvp3260-5990-faq/ They said that is in the Philips manual concerning the number of file and folders. I've only put about 468 files on a 320GB external HDD, so I haven't came near those numbers myself. Someone that has used a larger drive or smaller files may be able to answer that from experience. The Philips manual says:

– The unit can only support up to a maximum of 300 folders and 648 files.

And that's a bit vague.

My assumption is that you can have up to 648 files in each of the 300 folders, but those are both odd numbers for a computer system. Don't know what they would relate to.

[gll99]

Hi All,
My problem now is I dont have any other spare drive to copy the files and partition the WD USB disk drive. So is there any other way to have the player read the files?

Thanks.

It's probably easier to connect the drive to your pc and move the videos to a higher ranking folder where you can access them. Moving a single file or even multiple files at the same time on the same drive is very fast since the files do not physically move, only the pointers in the fat are re-addressed so it would be quicker than any other solution.

[jman98]

The Philips manual says:

– The unit can only support up to a maximum of 300 folders and 648 files.

And that's a bit vague.

My assumption is that you can have up to 648 files in each of the 300 folders, but those are both odd numbers for a computer system. Don't know what they would relate to.

Vague indeed, but it could still mean that those are total limits on files and NOT just per folder. The reason I jumped in on this is that last year someone was talking about a problem with this player where they had something like 700 or 800 files on a disk drive and it wouldn't see all of them. I suggested that maybe this limit of 648 files applied to the whole disk. I don't remember for sure who it was, but one of the forum members who didn't even own the player jumped all over me and gave a pretty savage reply about how these numbers surely applied to each folder and how stupid I was for even suggesting otherwise. Again, note that I said that this guy didn't even own the player. Well, shortly thereafter someone who did own it said that those numbers applied to the whole disk. So the reason I remember that whole exchange is because I got flamed pretty bad for suggesting that the limits were not per folder and some other poster said that I was right.

Those numbers are quite odd as they are not close to powers of 2, which is what I would have expected.

[huykin]

I know this thread is a couple of months old, but in case anybody needs a confirm, the 648 file limit in DVP5990 is for 1 folder, so you can have many folders with up to 648 files in each. Otherwise, the USB HDD functionality would be rather useless given the number of picture/music/video files one can have on a large USB HDD. I do own the player.

[cal_tony]

My understanding of the 648 number is that Fat32 like the 4gb restriction also has a number of files restriction. I thought I read that this number was just over 600 files total. So if the disk has 2 partitions than the limit is 1200.

I further thought that since the total number was a Fat32 restriction that once the total number was written to the disk any further attempt to add additional files would result in the your computer giving a "disk full" notice.

To me, it seemed that to overcome these restrictions(4GB and 600 files) Microsoft developed EXFat. However, EXfat without a firmware update to the 5990 doesn't work on the 5990.

Tony

[huykin]

Are you kidding? You think all Win98 users had at most 600 files per disk partition? That wasn't too long ago, if you are over 30 like me, and life wasn't that bad then.

I have a USB HDD formatted as FAT32 and have many thousands of files on it. DVP5990 plays them fine, as long as I don't go over 648 files per folder.

[cal_tony]

After posting the above I did go back to Wikipedia to see what they had to say about the number of files allowed by fat 32 and wiki says 65000. However, earlier in the week when I was following another post re: Exfat I did run into an article that said the Fat 32 file sys was 600+ files and that was one of the reasons for Exfat. After writing the above and re-reading it, I thought thats not right so I did go to Wiki. Now I'm confused by all of it.

I havn't had any playing problems with filled up a 1TB drive with 2 partitions. But I do expect that over time if I erase and re-write files to the disk, the files will be harder and harder to play in my 5990.


I further went back to the above mentioned disk(1tb) and counted the number of files on this disk. On the first partition I have a folder with over 500 files on it and another folder with 300 files on it. So, thats 800 in just 2 folders. I have another 20 folders on this partition with approx 10 files each. This brings the total on just this partition to about 1000 files.



Tony

[huykin]

The only tiny limit of a few hundred that I am aware of is 512 entries in the root of an original FAT16 partition. But the days of FAT16 are gone, and I think most people don't need more than 512 entries in the root anyway...

[jagabo]

If I remember correctly, the FAT file system only allows 11 characters for each directory entry (with 8.3 file names one directory entry = one file, a directory entry is 32 bytes and includes the file name, the attributes, creation date, etc). Files with long file names use multiple directory entries to hold their full file name.

The FAT32 root and subdirectories are not limited in the number of files they can contain. But the 648 per folder limit of the Philips players may refer to the directory entries, not the full file names. So they may be able to handle 648 files with short names, but fewer with long names.

It wouldn't surprise me if there were other limitations that are hard to explain to end users. I wouldn't count on, say, the 5990 being able to see 600 folders in the root, each with 600 sub folders, and each subfolder with 600 files. Something else in the firmware might break before seeing it all.

[huykin]

A person with so many files should spend $100 on a WD player. I don't have one (yet), but looks like that one supports NTFS and doesn't have any limits on the number of files/folders. (Also supports HD, playlists, etc.)

By the way, per manual DVP5990 supported number of folders is 300, so 600 folders in root is not supposed to work.