Location of ATV Local Media?

[ckgoodwin]

Hey All,

Long time ATV user, total Boxee noob here. I have successfully patched my 160GB ATV v 2.2 and Boxee runs fine, but it's not seeing any of the local music/video content that's been synced to the ATV via iTunes (98% DRM Free).

I see the default local sources set for /Users/frontrow/music etc. but no music or videos show up in the UI.

SSH to the ATV and I don't see any files listed in /Users/frontrow/music, /Users/frontrow/movies either (are those the right paths?)

I am probably missing something obvious here, but danged if I can tell what - so any suggestions much appreciated.

- Chris

[ckgoodwin]

Ok, so I located the music storage on the ATV at "mnt/media/media files". But this directory is full of iTunes style folders named f001 etc. I can play the mp3s in each of these folders and Boxee displays the artist and song title etc fine. I then went ahead and added "mnt/media/media files" as a local source and now Boxee displays 4 random albums from my collection which I can play but that's it.

I must be missing something here on how to get Boxee to recognize the music stored on the ATV. Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?

- Chris

[steveo]

...mounting "Media Library" instead. I would try it right now but my damn gf is watching her crap right now. Sigh

[ckgoodwin]

What is the full path to Media Library?

- Chris

[steveo]

/mnt/Media/Media Library/

Tho this isn't a directory it may still be mountable. Still haven't been able to try!! I need another TV!!

[steveo]

Ya it's not recognized as being a mount point. hmmm

[marcel]

hi ckgoodwin
boxee usually starts to index in the background.. it might still be indexing and you have a large amount of contents ..you can try manually recognizing the media files (not the most efficient way) ...

Please send me your debug logs...

[iBog]

Will Boxee index videos synced with iTunes?

[ckgoodwin]

Marcel, Thanks for the reply. I have had Boxee on and off quite a bit since my initial install what with the 2.2 update and my frequent fiddling and have probably not left it running uninterrupted for very long.

I don't have a huge media library - ~6500 songs (about 30 GBs) plus 20Gbs photos (sync'ed to the ATV) and about 120GBs of DVD rips on an external SMB share that are mostly streamed.

I can certainly let it run overnight or longer - I will give that a try I guess, but how should my local media sources be configured when I start that process. I initially got zero content when I started with the default location of /Users/frontrow/... I am currently getting some content displayed using mnt/media/media files/... but can remove that if it's better to stick with the defaults - so please advise.

Also happy to send on debug logs - need some guidance on how to do that.

Thanks...

- Chris

[marcel]

hi ckgoodwin

use this path mnt/media/media files/ and leave it a while to index...if it still not displaying then i will help you the debug logs..

cheers:)

[scrytch]

hi ckgoodwin

use this path mnt/media/media files/ and leave it a while to index...if it still not displaying then i will help you the debug logs..

cheers:)

I've done this for photos (mnt/media/photos) but it brings everything up as folders containing photos. Any way to just flatten it and just show photos with no folders?

Thanks,
Shane.

[ckgoodwin]

Thanks Marcel, will give that a try tonight and let you know what I find.

- Chris

[zamn]

Well your not alone ckgoodwin, I am seemingly having the same issue as you, except that on top of not being able to access local media I am also not finding any media when searching through network sources as well (though my computers are showing up and I have added all the files I want to share on the computers to SMB share).

I'll be keeping an eye one this as well, though you seem to have been able to find some media through the mtn/ path? I haven't found any media whatsoever through mine that way. I'm sure all the kinks will work out soon so I will keep my eyes open here.

JP

[ckgoodwin]

Ok, I retested this and set up a fresh local source for "mnt/media/media files/" and let Boxee sit with it for a few hours. When I came back, it had once again only located a few songs from 3 random albums. I went to play a one of the songs and after a few seconds of playback Boxee exited unexpectedly with Error 11 - so no joy so far.

I am away from my ATV for the weekend but would be happy to provide logs etc. for further trouble shooting when I am back if that was possible...

- Chris

[marcel]

@ckgoodwin please send us the logs when you have the time..cheers:)

[marcel]

@zamn are you receiving an error when you try to add your network sources..

[ckgoodwin]

Ok, need a bit of guidance on what logs and where...

- Chris

[agentlame]

Ok, need a bit of guidance on what logs and where...

- Chris

see here: http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=1366&highlight=bugs

[zamn]

@zamn are you receiving an error when you try to add your network sources..

It doesn't technically list it as an "error" message but yes I do receive this message:

"No files found at source."

Thats the message I get when I go through the path Settings/Media Sources/Network Sources/ and then select the computer name where my media is stored.

Also on that same computer I have turned SMB sharing both on and off and included the top folder (and subsequent folders that lay within the master folder) of my media source folders in the sharing preferences as well.


As for the "Local Media" on my AppleTV... I have the same problem, pretty much verbatim (minus it even finding a few files), that ckgoodwin is having.

[marcel]

have you checked out these threads

http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=1496

http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=1352

http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=1238

[pengoboy]

is the mnt folder invisible? I am Cyberducking into the old boy and I can't seem to find it.

[zamn]

Thanks for the links Marcel.

Yeah, I previously checked them and it was a "no go", THEN with a restart of the AppleTV they appeared so that issue is fixed! :D

Have we figured out how to find the local media yet? Mine is still not showing up as well.

Thanks!

[ckgoodwin]

Ok, finally got around to collecting and sending my logs to allyourbugs. Let me know if I can provide any other info...

- Chris

[sean808080]

count me among those that can't get boxee to see the local apple tv content. other than that it sure is impressive.



Thanks for the links Marcel.

Yeah, I previously checked them and it was a "no go", THEN with a restart of the AppleTV they appeared so that issue is fixed! :D

Have we figured out how to find the local media yet? Mine is still not showing up as well.

Thanks!

[JustinD]

Add me to the list. Just setup my aTV with Boxee last night.

I put a single movie on the internal aTV drive. Waited, waited, waited. About 5 minutes later, it was recognized and showed up automatically in Videos and Recently Added.

Then I put another movie on the drive. Waited, waited, waited, nothing. Manually went into Sources and hit the Update button at the bottom, nothing.

Ended up going into Videos -> Sources -> Local Video, and there was my second movie file. Boxee knew it was there, and after going through the manual Recognize steps, it was able to find a match in IMDB.

But, this second movie refused to be indexed automatically.

This is potentially a huge problem, as I'd like to move a ton of movies over to the internal aTV drive, but if I need to manually go through that multi-step Recognize process, that's a *huge bummer.*

From the sounds of other people's similar situations, it does seem like there's something going on preventing Boxee from properly automatically indexing added media files… =|

Other than that, Boxee is rocking so far!

[zerock]

Add me to the list. Just setup my aTV with Boxee last night.

I put a single movie on the internal aTV drive. Waited, waited, waited. About 5 minutes later, it was recognized and showed up automatically in Videos and Recently Added.

Then I put another movie on the drive. Waited, waited, waited, nothing. Manually went into Sources and hit the Update button at the bottom, nothing.

Ended up going into Videos -> Sources -> Local Video, and there was my second movie file. Boxee knew it was there, and after going through the manual Recognize steps, it was able to find a match in IMDB.

But, this second movie refused to be indexed automatically.

This is potentially a huge problem, as I'd like to move a ton of movies over to the internal aTV drive, but if I need to manually go through that multi-step Recognize process, that's a *huge bummer.*

From the sounds of other people's similar situations, it does seem like there's something going on preventing Boxee from properly automatically indexing added media files… =|

Other than that, Boxee is rocking so far!

I hope I don't have to do each one manually.. but I'm having the same issues. Will try to do factory settings, and re-do my boxee install.

[ckgoodwin]

With a new $4MM burning a hole in their pockets, I expect we'll see this fixed momentarily!

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10100923-2.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

Congrats on the funding guys. Now keep up the good work...

- Chris

[zamn]

Any news on fixing this issue yet? Sadly this really is part of the reason that Boxee has started to become unusable by me (as well as really poor Hulu stuttering and can't get any 720p videos to play without stuttering as well), though I'm sticking to it for a while.

Just had to double check if there is a fix for this. I've tried waiting for it to index overnight as well and it was a no go. That and I really have a small library of music and videos... not even enough to fill up my iphone, so that probably isn't the issue.

Thanks guys and good luck on all these little fixes, it will be a well oiled machine when its at full release.

JP

[srafail]

Hey guys,

I just installed Boxee on my ATV and I didn't think it would be this difficult to get my local music/video/photos viewable. I've read the posts and there seems to be no answer yet as to how to load up our iTunes library ... which unfortunately makes the Boxee nothing more than a glorified Internet Video/Music proxy.

Is there a proven known way for Boxee to work with the iTunes library? or are we all just guessing here?

Thanks

Sam

[Icenrye]

Same thing here. Boxee has discovered my entire network, however, it sees nothing on my ATV. According to settings, it's set up to go to the frontrow/music (video) folders, but it's not showing anything, including my DRM free content.

[ShakeBobWillis]

I don't have a huge media library - ~6500 songs (about 30 GBs) plus 20Gbs photos (sync'ed to the ATV) and about 120GBs of DVD rips on an external SMB share that are mostly streamed.


I have about 18,000 songs (120GB) and that took over a full day to index all of them. Just wait. There's nothing else you can really do. And when you think you've waited enough, just wait longer...lol.

I hope at some time Boxee just indexes off of your own idtags, only using online databases when a specific song/album/movie/etc is being recommended over the social network (given that a standard format works better for pointing people to your recommandations online). But I see no reason why for local use of files Boxee should take the long way around and use on online database to scrape information from.


*EDIT* Although all my media is stored on an external HDD attached to the USB port on the AppleTV. I don't sync anything to the ATV itself unless its a movie I plan on viewing through the AppleTV's FrontRow. Other than the long wait I don't seem to have any additional indexing problems (it does find everything eventually). Maybe it's just beacuse all the media on ATV is so buried in deep folder structures that it takes a lot longer?

[ckgoodwin]

Ok, so I wanted to revisit this thread to circle back on a couple questions I was hoping to clarify in my original post.

Since my OP, I took a little Boxee hiatus following the ATV 2.3 upgrade but this past week, re-patched my ATV using a new patchstick created using ATVUSB-Creator 1.0.b.10, and then downloaded/installed the latest launcher and Boxee, which all worked fine.

The new version of Boxee also worked fine overall but still did not find ANY of the 140GBs or so of music, photos and videos I have sync'ed to the ATV via iTunes (Win Vista) even after specifically adding a local source for mnt/media/media files (where my iTunes content seems to live) and hours of letting it run.

So back to my three fundamental questions:

1. Is Boxee currently capable of scanning the native iTunes folder structure on the ATV to discover media? The answer seems be no as far as I can tell from this thread and my own experience but I would be happy to be corrected on that.

2. Where does iTunes sync'ed content live on the ATV? Boxee seems to expect it to be at /Users/frontrow/music etc. but on my ATV there is no content in these locations - so the default configuration will certainly fail to find iTunes content. All my sync'ed content seems to be at mnt/media/media files in cryptic F01, F02, F03 folders from iTunes. Is that as expected?

3. If Boxee is (or expects to be) able to scan the iTunes content on ATV, and that content is stored in mnt/media/media files - why are the default local sources for music, photos and video all set to /Users/frontrow/music etc?

I love what Boxee is trying to do, but for now, I need to use it along side the native ATV interface so until it can leverage the content I am already sync'ing to the ATV via iTunes, it will remain an interesting novelty for me...

Thanks for any feedback or suggestions...

- Chris

[drewcstuart]

I downloaded and installed Boxee today without any problems (I did have to review the forums and 'zero out' my thumb drive to install the .dmg).

However, I'm experiencing all of the same problems described by ckgoodwin. While I have a Macboook, all of my media and iTunes is on a Win XP (Dell Inspiron) machine, and everything is sync'd to Apple TV. (The media is actually on a external drive attached to the Dell - but this is why I keep everything sync'd to ATV as well).

Boxee is running 0.9.7.4825, Build Jan 7.

Anyway, after 12 hours there's not a single thing sync'd. I pathed a new Local Source to /mnt/media/Media Files and still nothing... again after 12 hours not a single items appears in Albums or Artists or Movies or TV Shows. Again all my media about about 98% DRM free.

The only way I have now been able to play local media is to use the Primary Menu, navigate to a Media Menu like 'Music' if I choose Browse, then Devices - If I navigate to the Media Files folder noted above, I get to a series of folders called F00, F01... F99. If I open one of these folders the MP3 files have four letter names like IIPM.MP3 once played however Boxee can recognize the artist, album art, and pull up lyrics...

I'd love to hear more response to this, it seems to have been a problem since October...

Thanks!

[gregula]

I have also been having the same problem. Media files on my AppleTV are not seen by Boxee.

Can someone from the Boxee team please respond to this thread and at least let us know you are working on the problem??? For example, should the default be the frontrow path currently used?

Thanks.:confused:

[dannycol]

Hi

I have the same problem.. the local media files show up but as others have said,, no artist, albums or play lists.. I have over 2000 images (photos) on ATV in around 30 folders.. but with boxee i get 100.. F folders with all my images mixed up within these folders... Not good.. I'v now ssh'd my image folders into boxee frontrow and all works well... Just painfull having to do that and also use up more storage space..

Hopefully it can be resolved soon?

[lbutler]

Hi I'm having the same issues as other users. Please help Boxee

[Ashu]

I am searching through this forums to figure out what is the simplest way for Boxee to pick up my music stored by iTunes/ATV - most of it is ripped from my personal CDs (more than 99%) and hence is DRM-free. Same thing with my pictures... I don't want duplicate copies on my ATV between Boxee and ATV/iTunes

[windsurf555]

Has there been any progress made on this issue? I am having the same issue and have tried all the suggestions in this thread. Boxee please help. :)

[mheizer]

I started another thread with the same question before finding this one. Same problem here.

[mg09383]

hi ckgoodwin
boxee usually starts to index in the background.. it might still be indexing and you have a large amount of contents ..you can try manually recognizing the media files (not the most efficient way) ...

Please send me your debug logs...
I'm also having the same problems/results (same configuration too) described above. I'm reasonably technical but this is kind of a pain and time consuming (not a feature I'd rely on many folks dealing with unless improved).

How do I send a debug log from an Apple TV - can I access it from my MacBook?

[marcel]

please use this thread to generate your debug logs http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=1366&highlight=allyourbugs