Your drives

How to add drives and folders, and how to name files so Finch finds them.

Adding a drive or a folder

Plug in a drive with your shows and movies. Finch offers to add it the first time it sees it: press A on “Add this drive”. To add one folder instead of a whole drive, open Settings, then Sources, then “Add a folder”: pick a drive and walk to the folder, or press Y (or choose “Type a path…”) and type where it is. A path that doesn’t start with / is looked up in your home folder, or in the folder on show, and capitals don’t matter, so videos finds Videos. Finch won’t add a folder that has other drives inside it, such as /run/media/deck; open the drive and add a folder there. In the Flatpak, Finch can see removable drives, your Videos folder, /mnt and shares your desktop mounted. To let it see another folder, run flatpak override --user --filesystem=/path/to/folder:ro dev.quietfield.Finch in a terminal (or use Flatseal), then restart Finch. A folder with more than 100 folders in it is split into pages; LT and RT turn them.

Looking through a source

Open Settings, then Sources, and press A on a source. You can browse its folders and play its videos from there. “Remove this source” is the first row inside it.

How to organise a drive

Finch reads the usual layouts. Any of these work:

Breaking Bad/Season 2/Breaking.Bad.S02E05.mkv
Firefly/Season 1/01 - Serenity.mkv
The Office/Season 02/the.office.2x05.mkv
Firefly/Specials/Making Of.mkv
Movies/Inception (2010).mkv
Movies/Blade Runner 2049 (2017)/Blade.Runner.2049.2017.mkv
Ember Fox The Last Sailor/Book 1 - Water/Ember Fox S01E01.mkv
Clock;Garden/Clock;Garden - Movie 01 - Second Hand.mkv
Sakuramon/NC/NCOP/01 - B★R★A★S★S.mkv

Folder names win over messy file names. A season’s folder can be called Season, Series, Book, Part or Volume, with a title after the number, such as Book 1 - Water. The word for season in other languages works too (Temporada, Saison, Staffel, Sesong, Kausi, Sezon, Сезон, シーズン, 시즌, 第2季 and more), and so do episode words such as Episodio, Episódio, Folge, Afsnit, Jakso, Bölüm, Серия, Tập or 第3話. A season folder named for its extras, such as Season 1 Extras, holds extras rather than episodes. Files in a folder called Movies or Films are movies even without a year. A film kept with a show, such as Clock;Garden/Clock;Garden - Movie 01 - Second Hand.mkv or Sakuramon/Movies/Sakuramon the Movie - Fox Clash (2011).mkv, shows up on the show’s Extras tab labelled Movie; if there’s no such show, it’s a movie. A show’s extras show up in an Extras tab after its seasons: files in a folder such as Extras, Featurettes or Trailers inside the show’s folder, and creditless openings and endings in NCOP and NCED folders (or NC), such as Sakuramon/NC/NCOP/01 - B★R★A★S★S.mkv. Anime releases work too: a folder such as [Group] Show (Season 1) [1080p] is named after the show, and episodes numbered from the show’s first episode, such as Show - 184, go in the season folder they sit in. A movie opens a page with its poster and description over a Play (or Resume) button and tabs for Extras and Details, as a show’s page has its seasons, Extras and Details (a show’s page also says which episode is next and how much is watched, and the Details tab of both folds the poster away); a film’s bonus videos (a Featurettes or Extras folder in the film’s own folder, or a trailer beside it) are on its Extras tab. Anything Finch is unsure about lands in Unsorted on the Home screen, where it can still be played.

Finch leaves out folders that belong to games and software: Steam’s steamapps, EmuDeck’s Emulation, RetroDECK, ES-DE’s downloaded_media, node_modules, and the system folders Windows and Linux leave on a drive. To keep it out of any other folder, put an empty file named .nomedia in that folder. Anything Finch had already found in a folder it now leaves out is marked Unplugged, and leaves the library after 30 days. To bring a left-out folder in after all, add it from Settings, then Sources, then “Add a folder”. Finch also leaves out a file whose name isn’t readable text (a name saved in an older encoding, which only happens on drives formatted for Linux); rename it and Finch finds it at the next scan.

Drives that come and go

Unplug a drive and its shows stay in the library, dimmed and marked “Unplugged”. Plug it back in and they light up again. Finch remembers a drive by its own identity, so it does not matter which port or mount point it gets.

Finch calls a drive by its name, the label it was given when it was formatted. A drive without one, or with a default such as NO NAME or Untitled, is called “SD card” or “USB drive”.

Finch offers drives that the system mounts for you; a folder on the internal drive can always be added from Settings, then Sources, then “Add a folder”, by typing its path.

In Game mode SteamOS leaves some drives closed, often exFAT or NTFS drives plugged in after startup. Finch opens them itself: a drive already in your library comes back on its own, and a new one opens when you choose “Add this drive”.

To stop Finch offering a drive, choose “Not now” when it asks. To change your mind later, open Settings, then Sources.

Network shares

Finch can play from a shared folder on your network: SMB (what Windows and most NAS boxes share) or NFS. Open Settings, then Sources, then “Connect to a network share”, and type the share’s address, like smb://nas/media or nfs://nas/export/media. The keyboard has a row for / : . - _ @, and the arrow key (or holding LT) for capital letters.

If the share asks for a user name and password, Finch asks for them next, and the password keyboard has a symbols layer. Finch hands the password to your system’s gio tool once and never saves it. Whether the system remembers it is up to its keyring, so after a restart you may need to connect again. For a password with symbols the keyboard lacks, press Steam + X and type with Steam’s keyboard.

Once the share is connected, pick the folder to add. Shares your system already mounts (in Desktop mode, or in its own settings) are listed in the folder picker after the drives.

A share in your library is listed on Settings, then Sources, with its address and “Reachable” or “Unreachable”. Press A on it for “Scan again”, and “Connect” while it’s Unreachable. A share that stops answering is Unreachable and keeps its shows, dimmed; nothing is removed while it is away. A share that sleeps is tried again every few minutes, and comes back on its own once it answers.

In the Flatpak, Finch can’t connect a share itself. Connect it in Desktop mode (or have your system mount it), then add its folder here.

A folder on a cloud or SSH mount (rclone, sshfs and the like) is read the same careful way as a share, so a mount that stops answering doesn’t freeze Finch.

This is for a Windows 10 or 11 PC on the same network as your Deck. It shares one folder, read-only, with its own temporary account, so Finch never sees your own password. Windows Home has no NFS server, so this uses SMB. Do the steps on the PC, then the last ones in Finch.

Make an account for the share. Open a terminal as administrator (right-click Start, then Terminal (Admin)) and type the line below with a throwaway password, different from your own (it is typed on the command line and kept in PowerShell’s history). Or use Settings, then Accounts, then Other users, then “Add account”, and choose a local account.

net user finchshare ThrowawayPassword /add

Share the folder read-only. In the same terminal, open PowerShell and type the line below, with the path of the folder that holds your videos. Or right-click the folder, choose Properties, then Sharing, then Advanced Sharing, tick “Share this folder”, name it Finch, and under Permissions let finchshare have Read only.

New-SmbShare -Name Finch -Path C:\Videos -ReadAccess finchshare

Let the account read the folder itself. Type the line below. Or open the folder’s Properties, then Security, and add finchshare with the Read & execute permission.

icacls C:\Videos /grant "finchshare:(OI)(CI)RX"

Make the network Private and turn file sharing on. Open Settings, then Network & internet, open your Wi-Fi or Ethernet connection’s properties, and choose “Private network”. Then open Control Panel, then Network and Sharing Center, then “Advanced sharing settings”, and turn on “File and printer sharing” for Private networks.
Find the PC’s address. Type ipconfig and read the “IPv4 Address” line, like 192.168.1.20. Keep the PC awake while you try it.
In Finch, open Settings, then Sources, then “Connect to a network share”, and type smb://192.168.1.20/Finch with your PC’s address. When Finch asks for the user name, type finchshare (if Finch refuses it, type the PC’s name, a backslash and the account name, like MYPC\finchshare; the PC’s name is in Settings, then System, then About), then the password you chose. Then pick the folder to add.

When you are done trying it, take the share away. In an administrator PowerShell:

Remove-SmbShare -Name Finch -Force
net user finchshare /delete

Then set the network back to Public if you changed it.

On a TV

Steam gives a game on a TV the resolution set as Maximum Game Resolution in its Display settings, and scales the picture up to fit the screen. When that is 1280x720, Finch draws at 1280x720 even on a 4K TV. For a sharper picture, open Finch’s page in your Steam library, press the gear, choose Properties, and set Game Resolution to Native.