[trey]

Hi,

First of. Great, great work with XBMC, without a doubt the best media center ever!


I have been trying to figure out how to get the best performance out of my XBMC Htpc.

Today i have a couple of TB of movies (in rar, scene standards) store on a server and using SMB to my HTPC. I have always used regular scrape to add them to the library.

I have played around with Ember media manager and was thinking of adding nfo, poster, fanart, extrathumbs and trailer (would really wanna have this in the nfo, but it works somewhat quirke, so download for the time being) to every moviefolder.

The to positive aspects for me using NFOs are that i get the possibility to add the set-tag for sets. And in the future i hope streaming trailers will work better from a url in the NFO.

Now to my question =)

For best performance. Is it smart to store the fanart, poster in the moviefolder when XBMC isn't on the same computer as the movies. Will it slow down the scrolling (or are everything in the scrolling, both fanart and poster cached?) How about when i pick up movieinfo, will it use a local cached copy or get the one on the samba-share?

If i do a regular scrape the fanart and posters are added to the database instead right? So all the pics are locally stored? So will this be faster?

Also another thing. I will add one more HTPC with XBMC in the bedroom. Is there a way to share database. If Not, what of the two ways would be best performance wise?

Best regards!

[AnalogKid]

Hi,

First of. Great, great work with XBMC, without a doubt the best media center ever!


I have been trying to figure out how to get the best performance out of my XBMC Htpc.

Today i have a couple of TB of movies (in rar, scene standards) store on a server and using SMB to my HTPC. I have always used regular scrape to add them to the library.

I have played around with Ember media manager and was thinking of adding nfo, poster, fanart, extrathumbs and trailer (would really wanna have this in the nfo, but it works somewhat quirke, so download for the time being) to every moviefolder.

The to positive aspects for me using NFOs are that i get the possibility to add the set-tag for sets. And in the future i hope streaming trailers will work better from a url in the NFO.

Now to my question =)

For best performance. Is it smart to store the fanart, poster in the moviefolder when XBMC isn't on the same computer as the movies. Will it slow down the scrolling (or are everything in the scrolling, both fanart and poster cached?) How about when i pick up movieinfo, will it use a local cached copy or get the one on the samba-share?

If i do a regular scrape the fanart and posters are added to the database instead right? So all the pics are locally stored? So will this be faster?

Also another thing. I will add one more HTPC with XBMC in the bedroom. Is there a way to share database. If Not, what of the two ways would be best performance wise?

Best regards!

It won't make any difference...
Artwork is cached locally as you say, however, storing artwork WITH your media has a number of advantages:

1) You get to choose precisely the images you like (scraping lets you choose, but if you rebuild your library, you have to 'rechoose' again)
2) There's no guarantee how long some of the scraping sites will be around... here today, gone later today etc. So having the artwork yourself is fairly wise.
3) If you DO have to rebuild your library (and many of us do it regularly), it's so much faster to have the art already with your media, and not have to download again
4) If you have a PC that's not connected to the net, then it won't matter... it can get the media locally

So there you go... it's definitely advisable, and the overhead is so small... most movies come in at 600mb to 2Gig, so 3 or 4 meg for images is nothing.

[trey]

Sounds wise =) Thx for the input!

Then i'm in the right direction. Already got all the posters and such ready so will keep at it. Too bad ember can't open rar-archives and get screens for extrathumbs.

[mcborzu]

Sounds like you really want to take care of your media...Don't forget to check getvideoartwork.com. Best site for beautiful covers, covers that are no longer cluttered with words. Unfortunately the site isn't being scraped you have to do it manually.

[trey]

Yea i'm a neat freak when it comes to this =). I redo my share once a year and need everything to be tight and shiny. Yea have that site. They have great covers.

[trey]

Got a bit stuck. See if someone knows if there is a setting i missed only. Trying to add covers for all the movies and want them to be named movie.tbn/folder.jpg. But they never get scraped. If i call the by there moviename.tbn they work. I thought if there where a movie.tbn in the folder this would be used before all others.

Tried searching the forums for this but most ppl just name them moviename.tbn.

[pletopia]

That's weird .. I use movie.tbn and it works fine for me during scrapping

what version of xbmc are you running? I'verecently build db's with Camelot final and now a svn post-Camelot (since there is a bug in Camelot that does not scrape trailers which has since been fixed in a more recent svn)

[trey]

That's weird .. I use movie.tbn and it works fine for me during scrapping

what version of xbmc are you running? I'verecently build db's with Camelot final and now a svn post-Camelot (since there is a bug in Camelot that does not scrape trailers which has since been fixed in a more recent svn)

I use Camelot picked up by ubuntu. So final Camelot. I've tried movie.tbn, folder.jpg, poster.jpg - none worked. Though fanart.jpg works for fanworks :S

Havn't had the time to get a good log showing what happends. Now i use <moviename>.tbn. Would have liked to use movie.tbn though because all my movies are scene-rared so if I scrape with ember it doesn't always get the right name for the movie. It takes the name on the archive (xxx.rar) and not the name on the moviefile in the archive. Most often they are the same though.

[Omnomnom]

Hi Trey, bit of a thread dig-up but I came across your post and wanted to speak with you in further detail, about how you organise your library as I have a similar setup to you, but the forum won't let me send you a message. It would be greatly appreciated if you would maybe contact me through a message or perhaps my email address which I can provide you with, as I have a few questions for you.

Cheers.