What's the deal with NFO files and Boxee using server data?

[voip-ninja]

So, I filed a JIRA bug report because my entire collection of "Dexter" episodes was only being shown under a single entry for one episode. I have full NFO information for this entire season, generated by way of Ember Media Manager.

Boxee replied to the bug report (in which I included a tar ball of all of the info files) that they fixed a "server side" bug causing this to happen and requested that the source be removed and added back and that a re-scan would fix the issue.

This concerns me greatly.

What's the point of me putting INFO files in for all of my media, if Boxee is going to mis-categorize my collection by using back-end servers? What happens if I add new content or need to re-scan my library and these Boxee servers have gone offline or are busted?

We need some real pressure from the user base to convince Boxee that local media should not be looked up online in any fashion!! The entire point of local NFO files is that I control what info displays for a show, series or movie, NOT BOXEE!!

[innoman]

All of my Dexter episodes appear fine, maybe it is the naming? Honestly, I don't use NFO files at all and have very few issues with anything unless it's a very new show or something really random.

Checkout theRenamer.com and see if maybe that will help clean your file names?

Alternately, click on one file and do identify and see if you can force it to pull the correct show info.

I disagree whole-heartedly! The thing I like about Boxee is that it does scrape online for my show info for local files.

[voip-ninja]

All of my Dexter episodes appear fine, maybe it is the naming? Honestly, I don't use NFO files at all and have very few issues with anything unless it's a very new show or something really random.

Checkout theRenamer.com and see if maybe that will help clean your file names?

Alternately, click on one file and do identify and see if you can force it to pull the correct show info.

I disagree whole-heartedly! The thing I like about Boxee is that it does scrape online for my show info for local files.

I think you misunderstand the problem. There was nothing wrong with the naming of the episodes, or the information in the NFO files. The problem happened when I upgraded the Boxee to 1.2 and (due to another bug) re-added and re-scanned my media library. At that point all Dexter episodes got filed under a single episode.

1. This behavior was confirmed by Boxee and it was reported as a SERVER side bug, on Boxee servers that were being used to classify the series (even though NFO files were present).

2. Other users in the JIRA thread confirmed the problem.

I'm glad that you have not had problems with Boxee looking up series/show/movie information for you, however, the problem is that if a local NFO is provided it should over-ride whatever it is that Boxee wants to do, such as go out to a server and collect information about a series and force that info into the user library database.

[morikaweb]

I totally agree voip-ninja, they need to drasticly improve support for local files.

They also need to add more control over rescanning, and add the ability to store nfo files in a local cache on a SD card/HD so the (local) server does not need to be constintly acessed just to read a bit of txt or jpg files.

[aaronwt]

They already cache the jpeg files. At least some of them. Most of my jpegs are cached in memory on my boxee boxes. If I unplug the box, connect it an hour later with no internet connection, the vast majority of the poster art that I created in ember still shows up. For the titles with no poster art there is just a gray box with the title in it. For the cover art that isn't there, as soon as I connect to the network the rest of the cover art will show up.

[twistybox]

They already cache the jpeg files.

Really? Cover art is as slow to display as it's always been for me. Each time the box is turned on it looks like it's downloading the artwork again. If that's just the time it takes to display the images, then something's really really wrong.

Overall I still consider the Boxee UI extremely slow. I expect better from the hardware it's running on, though I suspect the overhead is simply Boxee's XBMC roots.