Boxee 1.5 - the feature that nothing else has?

[boydd_uk]

I started using boxee about a year ago and was amazed by one feature that nobody ever seems to talk about - and whatever the merits for other media software - ever manages to get right. Boxee's indexing.

I never understood xmbc, wanting ME to spend hours arranging my media, so it could index it properly! I've always expected computers to do the work for us, not the other way around.

I throw boxee a directory (where I dump everything from TV shows to movies, and everything else etc). And boxee just deals with it. The only problem being that this indexing seems to happen infrequently so I have to leave the pc on over night, and boxee crashes and has to be restarted.

The question I have about 1.5, does it improve indexing and does it stop the crashes? I'm not bothered about any of it's other features?

[boydd_uk]

I started using boxee about a year ago and was amazed by one feature that nobody ever seems to talk about - and whatever the merits for other media software - ever manages to get right. Boxee's indexing.

I never understood xmbc, wanting ME to spend hours arranging my media, so it could index it properly! I've always expected computers to do the work for us, not the other way around.

I throw boxee a directory (where I dump everything from TV shows to movies, and everything else etc). And boxee just deals with it. The only problem being that this indexing seems to happen infrequently so I have to leave the pc on over night, and boxee crashes and has to be restarted.

The question I have about 1.5, does it improve indexing and does it stop the crashes? I'm not bothered about any of it's other features?

So comparing 1.5 and 0.9. 1.5 seems to crash much less during index that version 0.9 did for me. However, the accuracy of the index seems to have tailed off a little. For example "Red2010" has the wrong picture of the film "Flight of the Red Balloon", but it knows the correct actors and the film is the 2010 version and the trailer link is correct?? It's just the cover image that is incorrect? Same thing happens for True Grit (where cover is the older version). "The Fighter" get the cover of the film "2012 A Space Odyssey" heaven knows why.

So overall the films are recognised properly but the cover art is incorrect. Otherwise I would fully recommend 1.5 over 0.9 as it seems to crash less. Note I'm only reviewing 1.5 in terms of movie/tv indexing which is all I am interested in.

Any help on the cover art problem much appreciated.

[innoman]

I recommend using theRenamer (therenamer.com) to sort your media. In most cases, movies don't need to be scanned frequently so you could have them in a folder titled movies (and nicely named, etc...) and set that to scan daily. Have a folder named something like TVArchive and put older shows on that as well or previous seasons; really you can put all of your shows in there that have downloaded already Set that to scan daily as well, or even never and manually scan it when you move stuff into that folder. (Note: It wouldn't hurt to have a movie archive folder that gets scanned only manually). Lastly, have a folder for TV Shows that theRenamer actually points to and set that to scan hourly or whatever. In my case, I have an awesome script+batch file that runs every time a show completes downloading (using RSS and uTorrent). It makes a copy in a staging folder (so uTorrent is able to seed) then runs theRenamer which moves, renames and sorts whatever is in the staging folder.

It's awesome that you can have one folder with everything in it but this means boxee has to scan that ENTIRE folder every time, this is not efficient. Just because you can be messy doesn't mean you should. Computers can do the work for you, you can automate it. It just takes a little more.

If you like Boxee, try out plex. It does most of what boxee does and it does it better. (Boxee can do some things that plex can't I believe bot no one said that you have to only use one). A strong benefit to Plex is that it seems to not have to scan an entire folder each time, it only monitors for changes. If you add a show, it appears within seconds or a minute on all of your clients. If you have multiple front ends, it drastically reduces the amount of scanning required.