I have a DLink Boxee media player and it can not play content from symbolic links, it needs to access regular media files. Unfortunately unlocking/locking is quite slow for such a large amount of data due to the required data copying, but it should not even be needed since I do not need write access to any file to watch the movie or to play the song.
Is it currently possible or would it be possible to add a commands like "unlock" which would not copy the file data but simply move files out from the data store into the tree while still keeping the files read only? A corresponding "lock" command would also be needed to restore the normal symbolic link tree structure.
Update: I tried the rsync special remote http://git-annex.branchable.com/special_remotes/rsync/ and it works but the file structure created reflects the data store not the view given by the symbolic links.
The rsync or directory special remotes would work if the media player uses metadata in the files, rather than directory locations.
Beyond that there is the ?smudge idea, which is hoped to be supported sometime.
Yes, it can read id3-tags and guess titles from movie filenames but it sometimes gets confused by the filename metadata provided by the WORM-backend.
I think I have a good enough solution to this problem. It's not efficient when it comes to renames but handles adding and deletion just fine
The -L flag looks at symbolic links and copies the actual data they are pointing to. Of course "source" must have all data locally for this to work.