Two new installs - observations, oddities & broken bits.

[rjenkins 1]

Hi,

I've just rebuilt both my media systems using MB3.

 

Both are functionally stand-alone systems as the media library is on a Linux server via smb, configured using UNC paths in MB. Both are WIn 7 ultimate, one 32 bit & one 64 bit. LAV codecs on both.

 

Both use the basic theme, no plugins & everything set to Coverflow display format.

 

 

The video side (TV & Movies etc) seems to work pretty well. The only oddities are:

 

Scrolling through collections is a bit 'jumpy' - the side to side scroll is nowhere near as smooth as the older version & does not seem to be dependant on CPU / Graphics capability.

 

After a video finishing or being stopped, it seems to take a few seconds after the collection has appeared before it can be scrolled again.

 

Going to the 'actor' tab within movie info screen seems to cause a temporary lockup, there is a long delay. It was near enough instant in MB2 with the same imagesbyname folder.

 

 

 

The music side - which is more important to me - is virtually unusable.

[You typically select TV/Movies every hour or two; you need to locate dozens of music tracks to fill an evening].

 

I have two collections set up, Albums & Years. All files are properly tagged 320K MP3s.

 

 

The basic display of Albums sorts by album title and does not show the artist name.

 

I can understand metadata being used while displaying tracks, but it appears to be using metadata from a random(?) track with a folder to attempt to display a name rather than use the folder name, which I always have in artist-title format for albums.

 

 

This is not that good for single artists albums, but considering roughly half my album collection is 'various artists' compilations it effectively makes the whole thing pretty much unusable.

 

When viewing the tracks within an album folder, the Artist name is not shown for the track, just the track title. Again, bad enough when the albums don't have artist shown & complete nonsense in Various Artist albums.

 

 

The other half of my audio collection is singles arranged in decade/year folders, many thousands of tracks from the UK Top Twenty. (CD singles are a penny each on Amazon UK..)

 

Effectively, each year is a giant 'various artists' album.

 

Again the folder names are not used for sorting, it picks out random info from files within and the resulting 'sort' is completely nonsensical - the years within a decade can appear in any order & the tracks within a year (which can have 200 - 300+ singles) are approximately by track title. 

 

 

I have all extra sort / grouping options turned off, I just want folder names unless I'm looking at tracks.

 

 

The original music plugin on MB2 worked perfectly & the displayed info was fully configurable by metadata field names.

I've been using this as my main system until a recent hard drive failure forced a rebuild.

 

The second version of the plugin did not do this, but apparently due to limitations in available metadata.

 

 

Looking through the developer wiki, MB3 definitely has all required data & metadata available - please make the displayed info fully configurable at both folder and file level, it's pretty much useless to any serious music collector as it stands.

 

[i have often several and occasionally thirty or more versions of some tracks - all different from different studio/live/album/single releases; I don't want any form of automated grouping, I want to be able to select which album or year/single I'm playing. I would consider a moderate bounty on the properly configurable setup].

 

 

 

 

There is one oddity in the music playing side; when a track finishes or is stopped, the album or folder content re-appear - but the scrolling does not work for a few seconds then jumps erratically with long delays.

 

Exiting the folder & re-selecting it cures this.

 

After trying it while checking log files this morning, I discovered that this only happens if the WMC window is above a certain size... Running in a small window it's perfect, but when the window is stretched beyond a certain point (or maximised) it goes jerky-mode again after stopping a file. 

 

Possibly a memory buffer too small somewhere?

 

 

 

Software versions:

Server 3.0.5031.21343

Client 3.0.78.0 B10-17.2

 

Both machines are uses as dedicated HTPCs, the 32 bit one has 4GB RAM & the 64 bit 8 GB RAM.

Both have HDMI connections to 1080p TVs, via 7.1 amps.

All metadata fetching is turned off in MB3, media management is done from another machine & using Media Centre Master for movie & TV metadata.

 

 

Re. the Linux server being developed - I'm a long time Linux user & my main media collection is accessed via a Linux machine (it's on iSCSI arrays behind a Centos system).

 

If I can be of help testing, or programming when time permits, please let me know.

 

 

[Luke 36990]

This is too much information. Can you please create separate topics for each issue in the relevant section within the forum? Each with detailed information and logs if applicable. Thanks.