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Moving the Location of Your Flip Videos

Update, June 21 2009:

The latest update of the FlipShare software (version 4.5) supports moving your library natively. Get the latest software, then go to "Edit > Preferences > Library".

Older method, pre-FlipShare 4.5:

My friend gave my wife and I a Flip Mino HD video camcorder as a gift when we had our first child. So far it's been quite wonderful. It's simple to use and we share lots of videos with our family that live far away.

Today I was going through a backlog of videos stored on the Flip camcorder and saving them to my computer. The problem was my hard drive was running low on space.

I figured I could just change a preference in the FlipShare software to point it to a different hard drive where I had lots of space, but no such luck. It turns out that FlipShare is hard-coded to place your videos in a particular directory. I suppose this is to reduce the likelihood of accidentally losing of your videos. But it also raises the question of what to do with your Flip videos when your hard drive starts to run out of space.

It turns out it is possible to move your Flip videos to a new drive. It's not simple, but here's how I did it.

Note that I'm using FlipShare version 4.1.2 on Windows Vista. You can upgrade Flipshare here.

Disclaimer:

This requires a bit of hacking. If it doesn't work for you there's a chance of data loss. Before doing any of this I recommend you backup your Videos folder, especially the "FlipShare Data" subdirectory.

Moving your default "Videos" folder

FlipShare is hard-coded to store all of your videos in the default "Videos" folder in Windows Vista. You can change the location of this folder.

1. Close FlipShare if it's open.
2. Right-click on your "Videos" folder in Windows (my original path was "C:\Users\Tom\Videos")
3. Click "Properties"
4. Click the "Location" tab
5. Enter the full path of the new location (my new location was "K:\Videos")

Vista will create the folder in the new location if it doesn't exist. It will also ask you if you want to copy all the subdirectories of the "Videos" folder to the new location. You do.

There's a more detailed description of how to change default folder paths in Vista here.

I figured I was all done at this point. I'd launch the FlipShare software, it would see the new path to the "Videos" folder, and I'd be all set.

But it didn't work out that way. The folders I had previously within the FlipShare application showed up, and the video counts were correct. But none of the thumbnails showed and I got strange error messages when I tried to click on any of the videos.

As it turns out, FlipShare uses an internal database to store the paths to your videos. Even though it could now save videos to the new location on my K: drive, it couldn't find any of my previous videos because it's internal database was still pointing to the old "C:\Users\Tom\Videos" location instead of the new "K:\Videos" location.

The good news is that FlipShare uses the open-source SQLite database to store all of it's data. That means it can be read (and updated), using a SQLite database editor.

I'm not that familiar with SQLite tools, but a quick Google search yielded SQLite Admin. SQLite Admin is an Adobe Air app that makes it easy to view and modify a SQLite database. Download it here.

Updating Your FlipShare Database

The FlipShare database is located in your "Videos" folder, in the "FlipShare Data" subdirectory. In my case the new path to the database file was "K:\Videos\FlipShare Data\flipshare.db".

At this point I highly recommend backing up flipshare.db

1. Close FlipShare if it's open
2. Open SQLite Admin and open your "flipshare.db" database.
3. In SQLite Admin, press the "Open Query" button.
4. Enter the following query as a test to make sure things work the way you expect

    select replace (uri, "[old Videos path]", 
        "[new Videos path]") from MediaElementSource

Replace the items in brackets with the values appropriate to your system. After you've typed in the query, hit "Execute Query" to run it.

In my case the actual query was:

select replace (uri, "C:\Users\Tom\Videos",
    "K:\Videos") from MediaElementSource

You'll see output similar to this:

Take a look at the paths in your results. Make sure that the paths that are shown are the actual paths to files in your new location. You can open up a Windows Explorer window to verify.

Nothing has been modified yet. The query above was just a sanity-check. To modify the paths, enter the following query (with your data substituted for the brackets) and hit "Execute Query":

update MediaElementSource
    set uri=replace (uri, "[old Videos path]", "[new Videos path]")

In my case, the actual query was:

update MediaElementSource
    set uri=replace (uri, "C:\Users\Tom\Videos", "K:\Videos")

You'll now see something like this in your SQLite Admin tool:

You're almost there but not done yet. FlipShare also stores the paths of your video thumbnails it it's database. If you don't update the thumbnail paths to point to the new location, FlipShare will simply crash when you try to open it.

To update the video thumbnail paths we're going to proceed similar to above. First enter this query and hit "Execute Query" to preview the results of the update:

select replace(PreviewImagePath,
    "[old Videos path]", "[new Videos path]") from MediaElement

In my case, the actual query was:

select replace(PreviewImagePath,
    "C:\Users\Tom\Videos", "K:\Videos") from MediaElement

Here's what it looks like:

Again, check to make sure that the paths shown point to actual locations in Windows.

To go ahead and make the changes, enter this query and hit "Execute Query":

update MediaElement set PreviewImagePath =
    replace(PreviewImagePath, "[old Videos path]", "[new Videos path]")

My query was:

update MediaElement set PreviewImagePath =
    replace(PreviewImagePath, "C:\Users\Tom\Videos", "K:\Videos")

And here's what it looks like in SQLite Admin:

Now close SQLite Admin. Open up FlipShare. All of your videos and thumbnails should be intact, now referenced in their new locations. New videos that you copy over from your Flip camcorder will also be placed in the new location.

Enjoy and keep making videos!

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