Boxee is not usable, changes need to be made

[AJerman]

Alright, it's come time for me to write up a post for this and get some opinions and throw some of my ideas out there. I've been a huge supporter of boxee, and love the software, but the issues I'm having are getting annoying.

The bottom line is, boxee is not usable for me. Let me explain my setup. I have a PC with a 1 TB drive in it, and a MacBook that is stationary due to a broken screen. Because of the broken screen, I have my MacBook plugged into my 37" screen, and my PC just sits there beside it without a monitor. On the PC's 1 TB drive, I have 2 folders shared, one is a Music folder, and the second is a Videos folder. In boxee, I have set up 3 media sources. One is the Music folder, the second is a TV Shows folder inside the Video share, and the third is a Movies folder, also inside the Video share. The grand total is about 800 GB of media (HD video and high quality audio rips take up a lot of space!).

A lot of my troubles stem to all the SMB issues boxee has been having, and I don't know if there may be more improvements still that aren't in released builds yet that may help my situation. First, I can't keep boxee running at all times, thinking it's index would stay up to date. I have two issues with that. The first is that it typically drops the SMB connections after a while (or used to? may be fixed in newer builds, definitely better), but the bigger issue is that indexing 800 GB of media over SMB keeps boxee using about 20% of my CPU power at all times when running, even when it's just in the menus. In fact, right now, as I just started it and it's doing a big index (I haven't run it in a while), it's using what OS X reports as 150% CPU power.

So that means I have to close Boxee when not watching a movie, and have to open it 15 minutes or so before I want to watch something to give it time to index everything, in other words, I don't use boxee anymore.

Now, I understand that 800 GB of data over SMB is a daunting task, and it very well may be that I can't really do anything about it other than shrink my library or move some files locally. There are, however, solutions to this problem. Typically if I want to sit down and watch something, I know what I want to watch, or I may look around the TV library to find a show I want to watch. When I decide, I have to hope it's indexed, otherwise I don't get the local file option.

I think the best solution for this problem is to add a menu option, inside each TV show, to allow you to index it's folder immediately. There could a button labeled "Scan for updates" or something that will cause all indexing to pause while it looks in that one single folder right then and updates those TV shows. This would help tremendously and eliminate the need to wait for the indexing to pass by that folder on it's own.

I'd like to hear some feedback from other users that may have large libraries like myself, especially if they are stored remotely. Also, if any of the staff has any feedback or tips, I'm all ears.

I'd like to start offering boxee to people as a media system to run off a server back end, but at the moment, it's just not capable of doing that well enough for me to suggest it.

Thanks to anyone who took the time to read this post! Sorry it's a bit long but I wanted to get all the info I could into it.

[darcilicious]

Yes, SMB is problematic in the currently available version of Boxee, regardless of the number of files or size of files you're trying to get Boxee to index/resolve. This is well known and has been posted about many many times.

Often, mapping the shared folders as network drives via the OS on the system running Boxee will work around these SMB issues. Once you've mapped the folder with your content as network drives, go into Boxee and add them as Local Sources instead of adding them as Network Sources.

See if that doesn't help.

[AJerman]

Yes, SMB is problematic in the currently available version of Boxee, regardless of the number of files or size of files you're trying to get Boxee to index/resolve. This is well known and has been posted about many many times.

Often, mapping the shared folders as network drives via the OS on the system running Boxee will work around these SMB issues. Once you've mapped the folder with your content as network drives, go into Boxee and add them as Local Sources instead of adding them as Network Sources.

See if that doesn't help.

Thanks for the reply. I know SMB has been problematic, but I wasn't sure what it's current state is. Each new release seems to have updates to it, but I wasn't sure if development is at a state now of being basically as good as it gets other than some tweaking, or if there's still a lot more work to do there. That's why I also am offering a solution to alleviate the indexing issues instead of just making it a complaint.

OS X doesn't have the best implementation of a mapped drive feature like Windows does, and I didn't think it would make that much difference, so I hadn't tried that, but if it could help I'll give it a try. I just hate to re-index that much if it's not necessary.

I think I'm going to try removing my music from boxee to start. My TV Shows and Movies folders don't have many subfolders in them, but Music obviously has thousands which I think would slow the indexing even more. Plus I use iTunes for music anyway so they don't need to be in boxee. We'll see how that works.