(original thread) MP-TVSeries (2 Viewers)

[tompalomp]

Quick thoughts:
- Torrents
uTorrent *sucks*. I thought I could cope with it being lightweight and all, but it's just not good, it kills my router all the time whenever DHT is enabled, the RSS scanner sucks too, I miss 90% of the shows so in the end I have to download things manually, they don't release updates that often, and they got bought up so no one knows what will happen with it.
Bottomline is, I can't use that, so I'm probably going to try azureus back again. That implies that I'll probably do what some talked about earlier, ie download to a general folder, somehow know what the status of a torrent is, copy / unrar / whatever the file to a destination folder when the download part is over, and wait for seeding completion to delete the file(s) in the download folder.
I just need to figure out a way to retrieve info from azureus, which should be possible given it's opensource too and there are apps which do that already.

Some quick notes from me,

Azu is about 60% more processor-demanding than uTorrent, which is by far the fastest out there. Having 5 torrents running in Azu would make fullscreen viewing of a divx more or less impossible on a medium-ranged system.

More reading,
http://gomeler.com/2006/04/23/an-introduction-to-bittorrent-clients/

When Azureus was downloading the torrent, on my system Azureus was utilizing on average 70-80% of the CPU cycles and somewhere in the neighborhood of 160MB of memory. When I was just running GAIM, Azureus, Task Manager, and XP, I barely had more than 40MB of memory left from my base 512MB.

uTorrent is a completely different story compared to Azureus. When the client was running full throttle, it was consuming a measly 9MB of memory and on average 15-30% of the CPU cycles. When compared to Azureus, uTorrent comes out looking squeaky clean and the solution of the problem, but beneath these great results there was a problem. While the client was only eating 9MB of memory, the cache was eating the rest, once again leaving me with less than 40MB of memory out of 512MB. I believe this maybe partially due to my hard drive being a bottleneck even at 7200 RPM, or perhaps it is just part of the BitTorrent design, but either way, it caused my operating system to feel a little bit sluggish.

... given that most mediacenters are not monster machines and that we're running several processes on top of each other, i strongly believe you should fix your router rather than changing the outlook for thousand of the plugins users.

And for the record, i use Azureus on my main machine. I love Azureus

 

[infinite.loop]

Improvement Suggestion

one thing which would be very useful would be "Toplevel groups"

so when you enter My TV-Series, you could choose between i.e. "Kids and partents" or "comedy, sci-fi, comic, soap, ect."

 

[Ryoga79]

Due to popular demand I will look into it. Probably though it will only consist of a dvd icon (similar to the hd one) and an info menu telling you to input the correct media when you try to play. Should be relatively simple to do.

DVD chapters/episode selection of ACTUAL video dvds are not included for sure, nor will you be able to start such a dvd from the plugin. However on input the dvd should autostart in media portal anyways.

Oh....very little time these days.....so don't shoot me if it takes a week.

Inker,

I'd like to second the "offline media" addition to MPTV...as a new user, this plugin was the one that made me finally make the switch over from Meedio. If offline support is added, MP will do everything my meedio install had

To clarify, though, i just want to make sure we're talking about the same thing: On my old meedio install, i had it set up so that, as a separate import from the normal shared directory that contained my "online" tv eps, the importer would scan the DVD drive for my file-based dvds containing my "offline" eps. It would then pull the series name from the DVD volume name, and add it to the library. When i selected an "offline" episode from the list, it would then prompt me to insert the disc, at which point it would play the episode. Is this possible with the current setup? If not, is this what you are talking about implementing?

Thanks for your help, sorry if this has been asked to death, but, as you can see from my post count, i'm kindof a MP newbie

The plan is that you simply add your dvd drive(s) as import paths. All episodes imported from those drive(s) will then be marked as offline, you will see a dvd image (or whatever) and if you try to play it and the cd/dvd is not found it will show a pop-up to insert that drive. Once done, or if the cd was already in, it will play the episode. Also references will not be deleted (even if the option is enabled) for episodes marked as offline when the cd is not in.

I want to avoid taking into account the volume name of the media as it would require some big changes also to the import functionality. I'm hoping most people have hteir files/folders named on dvds in a way that will be recognizable by the plugin as is. I'm aiming to have it done by beginning of next week.

Regarding that anime thingy (split between two "libraries"), it will be possible once we have views (see my previous post). Provided of course you have some way of differenciating between them (could be folder stored in, genre, whatever...worst case you'll have to add all series you want in a view by their id/name if there really is nothing that they have in common, but I think that's very unlikely).

I'm also looking for some suggestions of default views that we could include. So far I think:

Collection (same as now...everything)
Genres (grouped by genre...series...seasons...episodes)
Recently aired (50 last episodes of all series sorted by their airdate)
Unwatched (all)(all episodes that have not been viewed yet....sorted by their seriesname)
Unwatched (series) (all series that have at least one unwatched episode)
Channel (grouped by channel, series)
Airday (grouped by day it airs...series)

You could enabled each one. I am open to suggestions.

Inker

Inker,

The DVD import thing sounds good...unfortunately, i wasn't bright enough to put the files in folders on the DVD, i just put them in the root directory and then changed the dvd volvume name to match the series name. Still, if i can manually edit the database and put the series names in myself, that's still not too bad. Having the little "offline" image is fantastic though!

As for the "views" options, they all look good to me...my TV series are stored in their own directory, same for the anime. So if i can group/mark them by parent folder, then i'm good to go.

Thanks for all the hard work!

 

[infinite.loop]

Azu is about 60% more processor-demanding than uTorrent, which is by far the fastest out there. Having 5 torrents running in Azu would make fullscreen viewing of a divx more or less impossible on a medium-ranged system.

i can not confirm that. at least not with my PC (Athlon 2600+ )

it is true that Azureus requires quite some resources (because of java) but that has been improved during the last 6 months.

at the end a working solution will be required, which may means that it needs more resources.
but good thing is that computers are always getting quicker

 

[pannivas]

I have just done a svn-checkout, compiled the sources and tested this wonderful plugin.

to be honest, i was surprised about the stability and usabilty.

GREAT WORK!

yup this is a really great plugin and its obvious that it has drawn many new users to the MP community, which is a great thing.

This plugin has my vote to be included in the next stable MP version and i belive a lot others will agree with me.

 

[tompalomp]

Azu is about 60% more processor-demanding than uTorrent, which is by far the fastest out there. Having 5 torrents running in Azu would make fullscreen viewing of a divx more or less impossible on a medium-ranged system.

at the end a working solution will be required, which may means that it needs more resources.
but good thing is that computers are always getting quicker

True, but i've learned something during my trade - always count on the lowest possible standard of the targeted system and everything else will be so much better

 

[Bobb25]

Inker,

The DVD import thing sounds good...unfortunately, i wasn't bright enough to put the files in folders on the DVD, i just put them in the root directory and then changed the dvd volvume name to match the series name. Still, if i can manually edit the database and put the series names in myself, that's still not too bad. Having the little "offline" image is fantastic though!

As for the "views" options, they all look good to me...my TV series are stored in their own directory, same for the anime. So if i can group/mark them by parent folder, then i'm good to go.

Thanks for all the hard work!

Yeah. As long as we can go into the database and mark eps as "offline" IE: backed up and if we can edit the databse ourselves then we can clean it up ourselves

 

[zeflash]

Some quick notes from me,

Azu is about 60% more processor-demanding than uTorrent, which is by far the fastest out there. Having 5 torrents running in Azu would make fullscreen viewing of a divx more or less impossible on a medium-ranged system.

More reading,
http://gomeler.com/2006/04/23/an-introduction-to-bittorrent-clients/

When Azureus was downloading the torrent, on my system Azureus was utilizing on average 70-80% of the CPU cycles and somewhere in the neighborhood of 160MB of memory. When I was just running GAIM, Azureus, Task Manager, and XP, I barely had more than 40MB of memory left from my base 512MB.

uTorrent is a completely different story compared to Azureus. When the client was running full throttle, it was consuming a measly 9MB of memory and on average 15-30% of the CPU cycles. When compared to Azureus, uTorrent comes out looking squeaky clean and the solution of the problem, but beneath these great results there was a problem. While the client was only eating 9MB of memory, the cache was eating the rest, once again leaving me with less than 40MB of memory out of 512MB. I believe this maybe partially due to my hard drive being a bottleneck even at 7200 RPM, or perhaps it is just part of the BitTorrent design, but either way, it caused my operating system to feel a little bit sluggish.

... given that most mediacenters are not monster machines and that we're running several processes on top of each other, i strongly believe you should fix your router rather than changing the outlook for thousand of the plugins users.

And for the record, i use Azureus on my main machine. I love Azureus

Well, How do you propose I fix my router? I can't, it's the router from my ISP.
Everyone know there is a problem with how uTorrent handles DHT. In their forum there is a whole sticky thread about it, how one should patch tcpip.sys in order to increase the number of half-opened sockets. Truth is, they do it wrong, Azureus does it equally good without the impact on the TCP subsystem & the router.

Azureus does use more RAM indeed, but on the other side, the RSS feed scanner works much, much better (it actually looks for the torrent file in the RSS linked URL, as opposed to uTorrent who's lost if the RSS doesn't directly point to a .torrent file), as said before it doesn't bring down my router while keeping the same download speeds, and it implements an auto-speed based on ping feature that will never be found in uTorrent (and believe me, I and other users tried to no avail in the forums - yet some hardcore power users kept telling us the idea was stupid and wouldn't help the community ... sigh)

 

[odin318]

pretty simple question, i think. I am using the latest stable release with the .9 release of this plugin. When I replaced the skin file from the plugin .zip I cannot see any series with the BlueTwo skin. any ideas?

 

[bobrap]

I know I'm being a pest, but, would someone please help me out here? I just want to know if the delete command in the pop up menu is working for anyone. I'm using the latest stable versions with Blue 2 wide and if I select to delete an episode it does nothing. Thanks for your help, work and patience.