NOB Questions (Slow loading lists,etc.) (13 Viewers)

[AlbertZeroK]

Okay, been looking for a good media front end for HTPC's in the house. While I'll likely build something to support BluRay for downstairs, upstairs I'm just using a P4 3.4/2G/Integrated Video/Vista Buisness - it's what I had and is working great. Anyways, my media collection is currently at 2TB and my audio is at 90Gigs - and always growing - especially with the price of 750G drives dropping. My collection is also all VOB so there is no loss of quality.

I currently have a media server down stairs in my rack with everything on it and have multiple 750G drives which are set to goto sleep when not in use for a while to save drive life and reduce heat. This of course means there is a lag when trying to access media on the drives that are asleep while they spin up.

Here is the issue. There is no activity on the screen during this lag time. Is there any way to either modify the skin or change an option to have the system display a busy icon.

And a few other questions:
- Any way to cache the weather data? We have satellite internet so when we goto the weather icon, we have to wait for the weather to load which takes a few seconds on satellite (due to it's latency issues)
- Any way to have the weather show up on the main page and not in the menu? My wife would love a small weather display in the corner of the screen for all screens except when playing video, etc.
- Any issues with large Music stores I need to be aware of?
- Any issues with large Movie/video stores I need to be aware of?
- Can I use the incoming video from a tv tuner card on one computer and pipe the video to a second or multiple pcs? Like having a bank of tv tuner cards in a pc hooked up to a number of DirecTV Receivers?

 

[charli181]

Here is the issue. There is no activity on the screen during this lag time. Is there any way to either modify the skin or change an option to have the system display a busy icon.

1. Some skins have a 'waiting bar' appear when there is a delay (spin safe series, X-Face). Another thing you could look at is with your movie and Music collections, you could scan your shares and have it in a database. This would speed up the listing process as it will look at the database instead of your shares. This can be done through the configuration.exe and to veiew the databases, select a view other than shares (like title for Movies, and Artists for Music). This will also assist with you ever groing collections where they span more than 1 drive. The database will make it appear as 1 list whilst spanning multiple drives. The only delay you will experience then is when selecting the movie/music to play (this is when the sleeping drive will start spinning again).

And a few other questions:
- Any way to cache the weather data? We have satellite internet so when we goto the weather icon, we have to wait for the weather to load which takes a few seconds on satellite (due to it's latency issues)

2. Sorry , I am pretty sure this can't be done

- Any way to have the weather show up on the main page and not in the menu? My wife would love a small weather display in the corner of the screen for all screens except when playing video, etc.

3. Last reponse I got on this was no. That was about 6 months ago. I would like this feature as well, but everything is in feature freeze mode at the moment....

- Any issues with large Music stores I need to be aware of?
- Any issues with large Movie/video stores I need to be aware of?

4. Like in the answer for the first question, Databases are the way to go. The size is not the problem. Also if you have multiple clients, you could run a central database so updating only needs to be done once. It is not documented just yet in the wiki, but is here in the forums somewhere. I will updating it this week with this information.

- Can I use the incoming video from a tv tuner card on one computer and pipe the video to a second or multiple pcs? Like having a bank of tv tuner cards in a pc hooked up to a number of DirecTV Receivers?

5. This is exactly what the TV Server is for. This will replace the in built TV Engine that comes with MediaPortal. The TV Server can run on your File server. ( this server does not need to have a DX9 card if you will not be watching from it). The fileserver does not need to run MediaPortal. This is exactly what I do in my setup, where my file server runs 2 DVB-T cards frlom my garage, and MediaPortal in the Loungs, Back room and Laptop are where we watch TV (SD and HD).

Pretty much what you're thinking of setting up, I have it implemented and works sweet. Took me weeks to start of with, but now I know what I am doing, would only take me a couple of hours.

Anyways, good luck and happy MediaPortaling.

 

[charli181]

I have added the guide on Centralised databases on the wiki if you need some extra information on how to set tyhat up
UserGuides/CentralisedDatabases - MediaPortal Wiki Documentation

 

[AlbertZeroK]

Ah, many thanks!

One last question, anyway to automatically rebuild the database?

 

[charli181]

sadly no. If you have already built the DB you can have a look at this guide that I wrote. Again, something I found about after the fact.
UserGuides/ViewingDatabases - MediaPortal Wiki Documentation

The other way is to start from scratch but it sounds like your collections are very big, so this would be your seconds choice obviously.

 

[AlbertZeroK]

sadly no. If you have already built the DB you can have a look at this guide that I wrote. Again, something I found about after the fact.
UserGuides/ViewingDatabases - MediaPortal Wiki Documentation

The other way is to start from scratch but it sounds like your collections are very big, so this would be your seconds choice obviously.

That's interesting, a simple command line switch would be nice.

 

[charli181]

If you have not built the databases in the first place, you can do it from there by running a scan. If they have already been built, then when you rebuild, it will go off to the internet again for all the IMDB info which can take a long time.