Newbie help

[davidtlewis]

Man. I hate to be this guy because I know as soon as i ask I'll have figured it out somehow, but after a few hours poking around i am lost and need help with the following basic guidelines.

1. I have 200 gigs of media. How long will indexing take (roughly). A few days? I show about %80 of my movies and no music or photos. Should I assume it is in process?

2. Does Boxee have to be on to index properly?

3. How long should I wait before tweaking and working on (read freaking out over) the videos that are loading. Ie. Mad Men is showing up as Made Men and is listing in Movie vs. TV.

4. Seems like some movies are listed but won't play. Once again is this just a timing issue?

5. Full screen. It seems strange that Boxee slips out of full screen and requires TAB to reenter when launching a movie // show.

6. My profile. Doesn't seem to be updating with my photo, etc in program.

Otherwise this is amazing. Sorry to be a pest. A lot of my questions (changing the background, etc) were answered by previous posters.

Great stuff folks!

[iBog]

This is a good question and something that should be looked into.

From a theoretical perspective, lets remember that Boxee indexes media based on the file name and doesn't actually have to read the entire contents of the file. Here's what Boxee does:

1. Detect new file
2. Parse the file name to determine it's a movie, tv show or music.
3. Parse the file name and lookup the title in the appropriate Internet database
4. Write this to the Boxee DB

Let's estimate that it takes 10 seconds to do all of the above (this would have to account for CPU, disk io, network bandwidth, network latency and response of the remote Internet database).

200 GB isn't enough information. How many files is that? I'll assume that it's all movies (only .avi files and no .txt files) and each are 700MB in length. That would mean 285 movies. @ 10 seconds per file, that would be 2850 seconds (almost 48 minutes).

Do you think my estimates and assumptions are reasonable?

Your milage may vary.

[davidtlewis]

Actually mostly music files. And I think i've got most loaded now. But somehow I've lost my connection with Time Capsule in the process (all of these files are networked vs. local). Is it possible the indexing somehow jam up the works?

[iBog]

Anything is possible since it's in Alpha still. Maybe all the network traffic overwhelmed your device or router and the connection was dropped.

If it's a wireless network there could be any number of reasons for the connection to be dropped. It's hard to speculate with more details or a network trace recreating the problem.

[marcel]

hi davidtlewis

welcome to boxee

how many files are missing ? what formats are the ones that are missing?

[davidtlewis]

Hi. I am trying again moving all my movie files (avi, mp4, m4v) into one folder (tv show or not). Reimporting into itunes and then seeing if that refreshes my boxee index. I have maybe 100 films // tv episodes total. Maybe 25 of which imported at all and about half of those played.

[davidtlewis]

Also some movies show up, but don't play. rather they begin to load and then nothing happens. But files are fine and open in QT and Itunes. I love the idea of Boxee, but some of these quirks have no rhyme or reason (would be best if i could reindex and add files). Should I reinstall the program? Does that help?