Long time to initialize plugins (1 Viewer)

[tmacca]

How long, on average, would you expect it take to launch Mediaportal, when using StreamedMP?

I have just moved from Indigo skin, as I have heard such good things about StreamedMP

It used to be a quick 10-20 seconds to launch MP, now it takes 2+ minutes

It seems to get stuck for a long time on "loading windows plugins"

I have even tried a complete uninstall and reinstall, using latest SVN

Plugins loaded (over and above the default)

Moving Pictures
MP TV-Series

 

[fforde]

What version of Moving Pictures are you using? There was a bug in Moving Pictures 0.7.1 that caused slow startup times if you have your movies on a network drive. If you are running 0.7.1 try upgrading to the latest version.

 

[tmacca]

yes, I am on the latest version, only downloaded and installed it for the first time today.

That does sound like the problem I am having though. All my media is stored on network drives.

I have noticed that if I enable "moving pictures" and "MP TV-series", startup times can be like 5+ minutes. Enabling only 1 of them at a time, the startup time is roughtly halved


I am wondering if my machine is up to the job? 3GHz CPU with 1GB RAM? If I pull up Task Manager when loading up the plugins, it looks like the CPU is pegged at 50%, but the memory usage seems pretty low

 

[fforde]

It would have more to do with your network connection than your system specs. On launch for network users the most time consuming task is the once over Moving Pictures gives your collection, making sure that no files have been deleted or moved. If you are on a wireless network with a poor connection, this can sometimes take a bit of time. For a wired connection it should be pretty quick.

 

[mitiok2008]

It would have more to do with your network connection than your system specs. On launch for network users the most time consuming task is the once over Moving Pictures gives your collection, making sure that no files have been deleted or moved. If you are on a wireless network with a poor connection, this can sometimes take a bit of time. For a wired connection it should be pretty quick.

for me thу same issue. All movies are strored on network drive connected with Wi Fi. Connection is relatively good, since I play movies from there. But starting up of Media Portal (starting plugins...) are extreamly slow. Once it's loaded everything is fine.

 

[tmacca]

It does sound like a similar issue, but I am not on wireless, I am on a wired Gigabit network and I using the latest version of Moving Pictures - somewhere in the region of 900 movies on a File Server (with dual Gigabit NIC). I have another machine which has no problems with this

Observations

If I disable Moving Pictures, the start-up time is around 2 minutes (still slow, in my opinion, but......)

If I enable Moving Pictures, start-up time is random, but anything between 4 - 8 minutes

However....

I have logged on to the same PC as Administrator, and startup times are much much quicker, both with and without Moving Pictures enabled

So maybe there is an issue with permissions somewhere? I have disabled UAC, and set permissions on the ProgramData and Program Files directories, but maybe I am missing something else somewhere?

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

I have logged on to the same PC as Administrator

From my experience, that is the only way to run Vista without issue.

 

[mitiok2008]

I have logged on to the same PC as Administrator

From my experience, that is the only way to run Vista without issue.

I'm on Windows XP SP#3. And it's still very slow. if it would help I could provide log-file. And btw, is it necessary to have latest SVN of mediaportal? I'm still on 1.0.

 

[tmacca]

OK, think I have got this sorted

All my movies and tv-series are stored on my media servers in the loft. I have a number of PC's around the house, all of which have point to the MP databases which are stored on the server

Some of these machines do not have full admin rights (in particular, the ones belonging to the kids) and also only have read access to the databases to prevent accidental (or deliberate, knowing my kids!) edits or deletions of records

It appears that when using 'My Videos', this has not caused any noticeable problems

However, I recently upgraded a couple of machines to use:

StreamedMP
My TV Series
Moving Pictures

The first one I did was the main HTPC in the living room. As this one uses an account with full admin rights as well as full access to the databases, this caused no problems and everything functioned as expected

The other machine was my daughters. I disabled UAC, gave write permissions on the Mediaportal dirs and expected this to be enough. However, it appears that write access is also required to both the databases as well - certain things are written there by both the plugins when MP fires up

I have got round this by creating a login script that copies the databases locally. This way, the kids always get a recent copy of the database, which they can trash if they want, but will always be replaced by a central copy at next log on



It appears the slow downs occur because MP/Moving Pictures/TV-Series, make repeated attempts to access the database before giving up and moving on - which in my case took several minutes. With both plugins enabled, it obviously took twice as long for this to occur

Hope this info helps somebody!