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View Full Version : What my Boxee is doing that is not ideal....



trey_loco
January 28th, 2009, 10:41 PM
I've been using Boxee for about a week now and though I've been telling anybody who will listen about the joys of Boxee, I do have some re-occurring issues that I figured I would surface and see what responses I get.

mac mini 1.6 w/ 1 gig RAM
Running version 0.9.8.4880 of Boxee
external hdd accessed through network is my storage

1. First and foremost, it crashes way more than I think it should. If everybody experienced dozens of crashes within the first couple days, I would assume it was a known issue and there would be a thread about it.

Here is a list of things that have crashed it so far
a. accessing the http://[IP]:8800 - when doing so, the app will crash at least 50% of the time

b. quickly and rapidly pressing a remote button - I have a decent size music library, so holding the button to scroll down to "S" has caused it to crash a few times.

c. Many other instances and scenarios have surfaced that cause it to crash, for no obvious reason

2. Remote will randomly stop working. I'll be doing something..watching a movie or what not and when I go to pause, skip, or leave the screen, the remote will not be able to move the highlighted section. It just stutters and stays right where it is. This is really annoying as the only thing I have found to fix it is reboot the app and/or OS

3. When I do reboot the app and go to the left menu, it is unable to see any of the files for the appropriate category [video/music/pictures]. I can browse to them just fine, but they don't show up in the thumbnail view until I do the following: I have to browse both videos and music in order for the thumbnail view to being being populated. This affects the "Recently Added" section as well. It's like it's not re-establishing a connection with the network drive

4. While watching a show, the mouse cursor will show up in the middle of the screen and just sit there. If I remove the mouse, during boot up, it hangs for a long time..searching for a mouse.


To the people responsible for bringing Boxee to my living room, I extend a huge thank you. I purchased a mac mini for the sole purpose of using it and Boxee as my media center.

andreslucero
January 29th, 2009, 03:01 AM
Very strange... I'm using the exact same setup and have only experienced #3 above (as described in this thread (http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=5074)). In fact, Boxee has crashed very little for me, even when using earlier alpha builds.

Have you used the Mac mini with any other apps for long periods of time? Could be an issue with the hardware itself (e.g. RAM not seated properly) that is causing some of this volatile behavior.

trey_loco
January 29th, 2009, 01:42 PM
The mini is near brand new and used soley for Boxee. I might just take the cover off and check the seating of the RAM.see if that helps.

Anybody else have any info on the above problems? Anybody on this forum? Somebody?

exile
January 29th, 2009, 01:57 PM
I can concur with #1 and #3.

The crashes are often and numerous and seemingly random.

The library not showing up each time I open boxee is starting to drive me a bit batty. it will show up eventually but I'm generally confused by the scanning process.

my frame of reference is the squeezecenter software for network music management. It scans your hard drive and searches out your music files. It then builds a library file and then every time the program opens it references back to that file. It's irrelevant if you've made any changes to the actual folder containing your music because it'll only scan your library again when you instruct to rescan. I think Boxee needs to have the same custom control of it's scanning process.

perhaps in the future...

trey_loco
January 29th, 2009, 09:43 PM
Can anybody from Boxee lend some info, if there's any to be had?

subvertbeats
January 30th, 2009, 05:24 AM
Can anybody from Boxee lend some info, if there's any to be had?

Im not from boxee, nor are any of your symptoms recognizble through personal experience.

However, I do have a suggestion, since you seem to be facing more troubles than the average Mac boxee user.

Download a free OS X app called Main Menu (Onyx is an alternative, but Main Menu has a really simple, handy menu bar based UI), and set up the batch tasks to clean everything, and run them.

http://www.santasw.com/

It will repair disk permissions, update pre-bindings, flush various caches and temp files etc.

Generally a good idea to do once a week or something. Many of the tasks it does are simply built in OS X maintenance scripts.

Give it a go, you wont do any harm, so see if helps improve the stability issues you are seeing,

rhammons
January 30th, 2009, 07:27 AM
Ever since updating to 0.9.8.4880 I've been experiencing a lot more crashing as well... easily 4 or 5 times a day with just moderate usage.