How efficient is Boxee at noticing changes to network media sources

**yesno** · May 10th, 2010, 12:34 PM

I have my iTunes library and a hard drive with video on it out on the network. I manage these things from my Mac, but I just set up Boxee to have read-only access to them.

It's going to take it a couple of days to finish the initial scan, I think.

So my question is, how exactly does Boxee check for updates? What makes it notice a couple of changed mp3s here and there in an 800 gig library, say? I don't want Boxee to be in the business of constantly thrashing my giganto hard drives.

I mean, a lot of OSs have things like FSEvents which are designed to make these things easy. I'm hoping that Boxee has some efficient system for checking for changes to file systems.

**Wi1d** · May 12th, 2010, 12:08 PM

I've got 6TB of music and videos. Every time a new version of boxee appears I start over with letting it collect the information and it doesn't take that long. Enough so that I have never really cared to time it.

I set it to scan then I get sidetracked for a few minutes. Maybe 30 minutes but no more than an hour. When I come back a large portion of it has been collected if it is not finished. I'm sure it varies depending on your hard drive speeds, and how they are configured (RAID). I doubt it would differ to much though.

As far as how often you can set it to only check for updates daily. I've NEVER noticed any IO issues with boxee running.

**yesno** · May 16th, 2010, 10:28 AM

I guess what I'm wondering is, exactly what method does Boxee use to identify new files?

First off, I'm noticing that files that I delete from the hard drive stay on in the interface until I manually delete them. Is that by design? I mean, if a file is temporarily not available because, for example, a network drive is unavailable, I of course don't want Boxee to forget about it.

But of course if I delete the file, I want it gone for good from everywhere. Do I have to separately delete the file from Boxee, as well?

And, as far as scanning, what folders does Boxee check? Does it re-check an entire media source, does it just look for modification dates on folders, or what?

It seems to take Boxee more than a day to find files that I have added to iTunes. (Boxee has read-only access to a networked iTunes folder tree.)

**darcilicious** · May 16th, 2010, 12:15 PM

"It seems to take Boxee more than a day to find files that I have added to iTunes. (Boxee has read-only access to a networked iTunes folder tree.) "

What scanning frequency did you select for that media source?

The Media source page should list the last time a folder was scanned too.

**yesno** · May 16th, 2010, 12:27 PM

I have told Boxee to continuously scan my media sources. I eventually plan to switch it to "daily." Even with this it takes longer than a day for new media to show up, which is what makes me thing that Boxee is re-scanning the entire media source rather than just checking for changes.

The media source in question is music, about 800 gigs. (Thus there are many more individual files than there would be even with a very large video collection.)

**yesno** · May 16th, 2010, 12:41 PM

Also, can you specifically tell me what Boxee does about media files that are actually deleted from the underlying media source? Do they stay in the library interface, even after re-scans are done?