Perfect answer! Thanks kizer!

Sorry to go a bit off track, folks, but what's the big deal with DDS fanart? I tried researching it, but it seems like it's just a different extension type for covers and stuff? I must be missing something... Anyone care to elaborate for me as to why it's super awesome?

 

It can make a big difference in the speed of loading fanart, so when flipping through a movie library, it can be the difference of a half second to a second for the fanart to load for each movie to it becoming pretty much instantaneous. Might not sound like a huge deal but can be a night and day difference with responsiveness when navigating.

Sorry to go a bit off track, folks, but what's the big deal with DDS fanart? I tried researching it, but it seems like it's just a different extension type for covers and stuff? I must be missing something... Anyone care to elaborate for me as to why it's super awesome?

 

It can make a big difference in the speed of loading fanart, so when flipping through a movie library, it can be the difference of a half second to a second for the fanart to load for each movie to it becoming pretty much instantaneous. Might not sound like a huge deal but can be a night and day difference with responsiveness when navigating.

I can see the value of that. Though I've never noticed any particular issue with responsiveness.... I'm using an ssd drive and it's pretty quick... Though now I'm curious to see the difference!

Perfect answer! Thanks kizer!

 

Your very welcome. I only know because I looked it up last week.

Had it bookmarked.

I think I might be going back to XBMC Freak

 

The reasons I switched to OpenELEC are:

 

1) Faster boot time

2) DDS Fan Art

3) Felt like a change of pace

 

What I'm actually seeing is:

 

1) Exact same boot time (~30 seconds on an 30 GB OCZ Agility SSD)

2) DDS Fan Art (yes, this rocks, and is worthwhile)

3) An incomplete library.  My TV Shows page only shows 6 of my ~100 TV shows.  I've told it to update the library many times, but the rest of the shows just down appear.  I'm reduced to browsing in the 'videos' page, which shows file names and no IMDB info.  My Movies also has multiple duplicate entries for Movies that are broken into multiple parts (such as the Animatrix, which I have encoded into individual files per short).  Some movies seem to have duplicate entries for seemingly no reason at all (and I have enabled the 'remove duplicates' option in the settings).

 

I'll give it a few more days worth of tinkering, but if I make no progress then I'll likely go back to XBMC Freak.  It wasn't perfect either, but it at least got me further than I currently am.  Oh, and the strange audio settings still kind of weird me out as well...why didn't it work with everything set to HDMI like it did in XBMC Freak?  All the hardware is the same...

 

So at the moment I'm thinking OpenELEC FTM (for the meh).

 

Rajahal, do you have you media sorted with nfo's or are you letting xbmc scrape everything?  I just scraped roughly 10,000 mkv's and all scraped perfectly but I manage my media outside of XBMC with Ember Media Manager for my movies and Media Companion for my TV shows. 

...very interesting discussion.

I am shopping for a media player solution ATM.

 

...just found that OpenELEC claims to be compatible with the xtreamer Ultra, here.

..and that the xtreamer ultra seems to be on promo for pre-orders as well, including some more additional extras until April 30th.

 

Rajahal, do you have you media sorted with nfo's or are you letting xbmc scrape everything?  I just scraped roughly 10,000 mkv's and all scraped perfectly but I manage my media outside of XBMC with Ember Media Manager for my movies and Media Companion for my TV shows. 

 

I also have no issues with 3600 movies and 26000 tv eps

but like Josh i have everything scraped by EMM and sickbeard

so xbmc only has to scrape the few ones that escaped the process somehow...

 

 

So just an update: I switched to DDS fanart in my regular XBMC install, and I definitely see a performance difference. Again, there was never a problem before, but now fan art is pretty much loading instantly, as soon as I scroll from one movie to the next (as opposed to a brief pause before it showed)!

 

Thanks for the tip, folks!

Rajahal, do you have you media sorted with nfo's or are you letting xbmc scrape everything?  I just scraped roughly 10,000 mkv's and all scraped perfectly but I manage my media outside of XBMC with Ember Media Manager for my movies and Media Companion for my TV shows. 

 

Josh,

Not to get off topic but can you tell me why you use Media Companion for your TV Shows?  I use EMM and haven't had any trouble, just wondering if I'm missing something.

 

Also, on OpenELEC, I've looked around quite a bit and the only thing holding me back from switching from XBMC Live is the difficulty in dual-booting OpenELEC.  The only way I've found involves basically triple-booting.  I've got a current dual-boot XBMC Live/Windows 7 that I'd love to overwrite the XBMC with OpenELEC but don't think it's possible.  That said, If anyone knows how I'd welcome the opportunity to look like an idiot.

Some of my files have nfo's, some don't.  I don't use a media manager (should I?), so I assume XBMC has to scrape everything.  I did turn on the setting to use the folder name to scrape, since some individual files have some pretty ugly names.  Should I turn that off maybe?

 

As I said, my movies appeared to scrape fairly well (at least all movies that aren't split did), but my TV shows just don't seem to be recognized.

 

I know I can enable DDS in any version of XBMC, but I've never had success SSHing into the box, so I've never been able to do it before.

Some of my files have nfo's, some don't.  I don't use a media manager (should I?), so I assume XBMC has to scrape everything.  I did turn on the setting to use the folder name to scrape, since some individual files have some pretty ugly names.  Should I turn that off maybe?

 

As I said, my movies appeared to scrape fairly well (at least all movies that aren't split did), but my TV shows just don't seem to be recognized.

 

I know I can enable DDS in any version of XBMC, but I've never had success SSHing into the box, so I've never been able to do it before.

As for the Media Manager, I highly recommend using one.  It takes more time but you have more control over the fanart/plot/etc. and in my completely unscientific research it seems that XBMC recognizes my videos much better.

 

As for your TV shows not scraping, how do you have them organized?  XBMC seems really picky but after some trial and error I got my stuff organized so it doesn't have a problem. 

 

A few of the keys I found were:

 

Making sure the TV show folder matched what theTVDB.com has exactly.  If theTVDB has a year after the title, use the year, if not, don't worry about it.  Sometimes I've done that and XBMC still won't find them, in that case, create a tvshow.nfo (named exactly that, not the "name of the TV show".nfo ) and all that goes in that file is the hyperlink to the TV show at theTVDB.  This info can be found here at the XBMC wiki.  Took me forever to figure that out.

 

As for individual show files, make sure it start with the title of the show (can't believe some releases don't have this) and the Season/Episode are in the correct format.  I've never had a problem with the format SxxExx. 

 

One other small one that may help.  If you've got "parts" instead of seasons/episodes, such as The.Pacific.Part.1.mkv i've never gotten them to work that way, if renamed to The.Pacific.S01.E01.mkv, they work like a charm. 

 

Hope this helps.

 

edit: fixed hyperlink

edit 2: formatting since I'm horrible about paragraphs

Two great articles if you have not already seen them...

 

1.  Creating a central DB for XBMC:  http://lifehacker.com/#!5634515/how-to-synchronize-your-xbmc-media-center-across-every-room-in-the-house

2.  Using Media Companion to do you media scraping:  http://lifehacker.com/#!5505849/how-to-whip-your-movie-and-tv-show-art-into-shape-for-xbmc-and-boxee

 

John

Rajahal, do you have you media sorted with nfo's or are you letting xbmc scrape everything?  I just scraped roughly 10,000 mkv's and all scraped perfectly but I manage my media outside of XBMC with Ember Media Manager for my movies and Media Companion for my TV shows.  

 

Josh,

Not to get off topic but can you tell me why you use Media Companion for your TV Shows?  I use EMM and haven't had any trouble, just wondering if I'm missing something.

 

Also, on OpenELEC, I've looked around quite a bit and the only thing holding me back from switching from XBMC Live is the difficulty in dual-booting OpenELEC.  The only way I've found involves basically triple-booting.  I've got a current dual-boot XBMC Live/Windows 7 that I'd love to overwrite the XBMC with OpenELEC but don't think it's possible.  That said, If anyone knows how I'd welcome the opportunity to look like an idiot.

 

Auto naming the TV shows properly is the only reason.  EMM does a great job naming movies but not TV.  I don't like MC all that much.  It does have a cool feature that searches for missing shows.  Also MC isn't really being supported right now, EMM is getting going again

 

Again highly recommend using a media manager

Isn't the latest version of EMM having problems with themoviedb.org?  Some people are complaining in teh thread and I just gave it a quick test agaist 3 movies and only one came back with fanart.

 

John

i have no idea, never read the thread except the first page of the revisited thread.  I'm using the Rouge scrapper plugin with imdb and its working perfectly.  I download fanart from all three options it gives you, not just themoviedb.org, almost always have at least posters

Ember rocks for movies and I use Media Info Plus for my TV shows. Both of them I use command line via windows to run via Task Manager. Of course this is one task I require windows for and thats why I wanted to build a low power Windows based machine and people thought I was nuts since I could always use a PogoPlug or something for Torrents. LOL

 

As for themoviedb.org I've always had on/off problems. I normally have it auto scrape then I later manually do it if needed then I follow it up with grabbing the images directly off themoviedb.org and drop it in via Ember.

 

I easy have 794 Movies scraped, imaged with plots and I think the first time through Ember took over an hour and now when I add a movie its like 2minutes.

i have no idea, never read the thread except the first page of the revisited thread.  I'm using the Rouge scrapper plugin with imdb and its working perfectly.  I download fanart from all three options it gives you, not just themoviedb.org, almost always have at least posters

 

OK...I'll have to revisit EMM.  I definitely like the interface better than MC.  Overall it just seems like a more robust product...but of course that is just looking from the outside.

 

John

Appears that TMDB is gaffed ATM:  http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=90682&highlight=rogue+scraper&page=81

 

John

Just remember one of the biggest scrapers for art work is down.

http://twitter.com/#!/themoviedb

 

So basically your fanart would be missing. When Amazon got hit with a HUGE power outage so did they.

When Amazon got hit with a HUGE power outage so did they.

 

Ahhhh...that makes sense!