Changing Vongo’s default directory for storing movies

Vongo is Starz’ approach to a “movies-on-demand” type of service. I currently use it and I love it. The only thing I think would make it better is, well, the obvious - more movies! Overall, I really like Vongo and I’ll tell you why. First off, it allows you to download and watch movies at the same time; this is amazing due to the fact that a 1.3GB movie can take quite awhile to download, even on a high-speed internet connection. Another thing I just love about Vongo is that it is on-demand and only costs $9.95 a month; this is a deal if you watch movies a lot. I’m not much of a T.V. person, but I do love watching movies. As there are many other cool things about Vongo, there is one thing that I though would come built into the settings, but isn’t; where to store your movie files. Let’s find out how to fix this small, but annoying problem.

As this article explains more than just how to change Vongo’s default directory for storing movies, you can skip all the basics and go straight to the part of changing the directory.

The Problem

Most computers these days come with a 30GB hard drive and usually a lot bigger. Most computers these days actually come with an 80GB hard drive or more. Your operating system (if using Windows XP) takes up about 2GB with Service Pack 2 and all the current updates as of the time of writing. When you actually get the 80GB hard drive equiped with your system you also have a bunch of add-on manufacturer stuff that takes up probably another 2GB. Usually when a machine is bought from a big manufacturer such as Sony, eMachines,, HP, etc they also create a partition on your hard drive of about 5GB that is a system restoration drive so that you can get your system back to the way it was when you recieved it in case you mess up something and need to restore. Personally, I just wipe everything out and re-install Windows from scratch. I forgot to mention that when you get an 80GB hard drive, you really don’t get that much. You are really only getting about 76GB. So let’s take 76GB and subtract the other amount listed above; 2GB (OS ), 2GB (Pre-installed Applications), 5GB (Restore Partition). This now gives you 67GB of usable space. Oh, and they you like to install applications that aren’t even on there like Photoshop, Firefox, and other applications. This is another 2GB of hard disk space being taken up (I’m being easy, mine is 4.7GB). Now, what about the “My Documents” folder? Whoa, stop - hold up. Most end-users don’t care about partitioning their system. I have two pretty good sized hard drives where I really don’t need to partition, but on an 80GB hard drive usually one would put an Operating system on one partition and data (Programs and such) on another partition. Since most end-users do this, you will find that your “My Documents” folder is found on the same drive as your operating system, applications, and other random stuff. With this in mind, let’s talk about the “My Documents” folder.

My Documents Folder

If you have multiple users on a system, then this is even more critical. Most applications default to the My Documents folder for saving application-specific data. For example, you want to save a Microsoft Word document, so you click the Save button, and it opens up a dialog and the default location that it recommends you to put it is in the My Documents folder. This folder can get really big. It get’s huge for multiple reasons, such as the fact that it set’s a default location for My Music, My Pictures, and My Videos. I do not use My Videos (which I actually never use) and My Music (I have a seperate hard drive for this), but I do use the My Pictures folder, which is 335MB. Overall, my My Documents folder is 2.37GB. If you have four users on your system (this is a shared system, for example) and they are all busy bee’s just like you, take 2.37 and multiply it by four to get a rough idea of how much space is being taken up by the My Documents folder. This is 9.4GB now. Let’s round up; 10GB. Now let’s take this from out figured amount of 67GB of usable hard drive space and now we are left with 57GB left of usable of hard disk space. We’ve forgot something though. We’ve covered the My Documents folder, but that’s just a sub directory of your “Profile” folder; held in a folder called the Documents and Settings folder. Let’s talk about this folder next.

Documents and Settings Folder

This folder is exactly what it says it is. Documents and Settings. You can usually find this folder in C:\Documents and Settings\. This is your profile folder. This folder (Documents and Settings) has subfolders of each user on the system. It has a folder called All Users; this has global settings for all ther users on the system. Then you have one folder per username in the Documents and Settings folder. I am the only user on my computer so in my Documents and Settings folder there are only two folders: All Users and Drew. If you were to go into your username’s folder you would see a bunch of folders and you would also not see some others (as some of the folders are hidden). Of these folders that you are likely to see are Favorites, Start Menu, Desktop, and My Documents. The Start Menu folder really doesn’t take up much space as it is usually just a bunch of shortcuts to applications. The Desktop folder, in my case, is big, because I leave a lot of unfinished work here, so instead of it being in my documents (filed stuff that is finished) it is on my Desktop; which is 300MB. Now to see what is hidden from you, you must go to Tools » Folder Options. Now click on the View tab and make sure the radio button for Hidden Files and Folders in the Advanced Settings portion is selected is checked for Show Hidden Files and Folders. This will allow us to see more folders that are hidden. Click OK and go back to the Documents and Settings folder and the user you are looking at (in my case Drew).

The two folders to pay attention to are Local Settings and Application Data. They both hold information on application settings and data pertaining to the user. This is good for the fact that each user can have certain settings pertained to that user, but that’s bad because now you double or more the amount of space that you have to spare for each additional user. My Local Settings folder is 445MB and my Application Data is 125MB. Just an FYI, the Local Settings folder is where all your Temporary Internet files go, so this folder is usually going to be big, and is going to be huge if you do not clear your temp files every so often. So let’s do the math for this. Remember, we will base it off my system and pretend that there are four users and we currently now have only 57GB left of space due to the previous explaination. So the Desktop folder would be 300MB (four users make it a total of 1.2GB), Local Settings is 445MB (four users make this a total of 1.7GB), and the Application Data folder makes it 125MB (four users make it a total of 500MB). So we add those values up, and we get a total of 3.4GB of space being used. We are now at 52.6GB of usable space. Let’s talk about Vongo now (I know, I know).

Vongo and Its Video Files

Vongo’s video files are big. This is why I explained what I did above. You start with a good sized hard drive and by the time you get to Vongo, you are left with 20-25GB less than what you started with. The size of each video downloaded from Vongo is different with each one you download, of course. I found that the average download size is 1.2GB in size. The actually size ranged from 532MB to 1.8GB in size. This leaves you with the ability to download about 43 movies (with the amount left over in this sitution). There are two issues with this. This leaves you with very little hard drive space and fragmentation of the file system increases a lot more. The system could become unresponsive, because of the fact that there is not much hard disk space left. Overall, the goal with this is to have plenty of system hard disk space left over, regardless of how many movies you download.

Suggested Solution

Don’t take my idea to the grave by any means, but I am sure this would really benefit you if you like to watch gigs of movies, but never want to let them go. There are three possible solutions. First, you could buy another hard drive and put it into your computer, internally ($80 + Technical know-how/extra money to have someone do it for you). Another solution would be to buy an expensive external hard drive solution ($160 - $300). Lastly, you could try my recommended solution. You could create your own external solution. This can be very beneficial to you, especially if you want to take your movies with you on other computers or just keep it separate from your system. You would need to buy a hard drive and a hard drive enclosure. I found a very quiet and very nice Seagate 250GB SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) hard drive from Newegg. Costs, at the time of writing, $74.99 and a decent hard drive enclosure (make sure it is SATA compatible) for about $35. That would be a total of $110. Great price and it’s portable! So, how would we be able to get the files to save to the external hard drive?

Saving To Another Source

I noticed that when you go to your Program Files directory (usually c:\program files) you will see a Data folder, an sqldrivers folder and some random .dlls, XML, and .exe files. There’s nothing reguarding any movie files. So I took a look at the Data folder and looked at file sizes; nothing that would signal it was a large movie file, so I investigated further. Earlier I mentioned how to see hidden files and folders, so I actually did this and another folder (somewhat transparent - that means it is a hidden folder) called Content was located in the Vongo folder inside the Program Files directory. Inside it were what looked like hashed filenames; they were big, long crytic-like numbers, for example, on of the movies filename was 8a4d6d11841b4a34bb0eb311eee69401. As you can tell, that sucks, but at least I found them. Also, there is no extension, they are just numbers and letters, no actual file extension. This still doesn’t fix out situation. So I figured that there was a registry entry.

Note: Remember, editing the registry is a very sensitive thing to do, as one mistake can render your whole system unstable and require you to re-install the operating system. If you do not understand how to edit the registry and are unsure about anything, please do not edit it. I will not be responsible for any system corruption or loss of sensitive data.

To edit the registry, you need to use the Regedit that is on your system shipped with Windows. Go to Start » Run and type in regedit, then press OK. You will need to go to the key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Starz\Vongo (HKLM stands for HKEY Local Machine) and go down until you find the Vongo sub-key. When you click on the Vongo subkey, the values that are located in the subkey are listed to the right. The one we are interested in is the ContentPath string value. If you double click on this key a dialog box will appear and you will need to put the new absolute path into the dialog box. When I say absolute path, I mean the full path. In other words, if you want it on your portable drive (say you have one) and the drive letter is drive F: and its in a subfolder called videos, the absolute path your would need to put in would be F:\videos. Click OK and exit out of the registry. You will now need to shutdown Vongo and restart it. If this doesn’t work, then you might actually have to restart the computer. The only way of knowing if it will work will be to download a movie. I would just restart so that you don’t have to test this, as if you restart, it activates all new changes from the registry. Also, I do not know for sure, but I believe you will need to move your existing data in the Content folder (I mean everything, not just the large files) into your new location.

Like I stated before, I have no idea why they don’t allow you to change this within the application settings of the program, but they don’t so we have to make due with what we have to work with. Have fun, and happy downloading; legally.