STV Import: TVExplorer for SageMC

[razrsharpe]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

I'm now having issues getting imported TV to show up in TVE. BMT has the metadata populated perfectly. I believe I turned on all the options which were required to get the imported shows to display in TVE, but I either missed something or screwed something up during install. Any ideas?

it used to work correct?

can you verify that BMT is showing that the MediaType=TV for a problem mediafile... TVE needs this to parse the imported media...

Also set the following TVE options:
TVE Options -> Imported TV -> Display Imported TV -> Enabled
TVE Options -> Imported TV -> Limit Search Paths -> Do Not Limit

[Skirge01]

Nope... never worked yet. Only installed this over the weekend and spent the rest of it trying to get BMT working. Now I wanted to try adding them to TVE.

Anyway, I checked that both of those options are as you described and that the files have a MediaType of TV. It's pretty much all my imported TV, which is quite a bit (Fringe, SG1, Atlantis, Doctor Who, BSG).

[razrsharpe]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

Nope... never worked yet. Only installed this over the weekend and spent the rest of it trying to get BMT working. Now I wanted to try adding them to TVE.

Anyway, I checked that both of those options are as you described and that the files have a MediaType of TV. It's pretty much all my imported TV, which is quite a bit (Fringe, SG1, Atlantis, Doctor Who, BSG).

man that's really strange.... one more thing to check.. sorry i forgot about it earlier..
Filters (on the left icon pane) -> make sure all filters are "No Filter"
Filters -> Imported TV -> No Filter

if you set the Imported TV filter to "Include" then TVE should only display your imported content (all recorded TV is excluded)

and just for completeness (im sure youve done this but just have to ask)... the videos exist in the default SageMC Video Library correct?

[Skirge01]

The filters are where the problem was. Now, I don't understand why, though. I have everything set to "no filter" except for Intelligent Recordings, which I had at "Exclude". Yet, the imported TV didn't show up. It also seems that if I set Intelligent Recordings to "Exclude" and Imported TV to "Include", nothing shows up.

Is this a bug with the filters or my lack of understanding as to how they're supposed to work?

[razrsharpe]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

The filters are where the problem was. Now, I don't understand why, though. I have everything set to "no filter" except for Intelligent Recordings, which I had at "Exclude". Yet, the imported TV didn't show up. It also seems that if I set Intelligent Recordings to "Exclude" and Imported TV to "Include", nothing shows up.

Is this a bug with the filters or my lack of understanding as to how they're supposed to work?

i believe its a bug... in version 1.00 all the filters are exclusive... although i would think by excluding IR recording you should still be able to include Imported TV... but apparently not... mmm ill take a quick look to see if its something simple...

version 2.0 will include a drastic (read major and awesome) upgrade to the searching/filtering aspects of TVE so if the bug is something more then a minor typo im reluctant to fix it at this point with 2.0 getting closer and closer

[Peter_h]

Originally Posted by razrsharpe

i believe its a bug... in version 1.00 all the filters are exclusive... although i would think by excluding IR recording you should still be able to include Imported TV... but apparently not... mmm ill take a quick look to see if its something simple...

version 2.0 will include a drastic (read major and awesome) upgrade to the searching/filtering aspects of TVE so if the bug is something more then a minor typo im reluctant to fix it at this point with 2.0 getting closer and closer

How close?

[razrsharpe]

Originally Posted by Peter_h

How close?

not ...that... close... but im making progress, mainly on the back end and getting the searching/filtering working... also as you may have read (in i think the sagemc screenshot thread) i joined the ortus dev team so ive been working on that too... we have most of the backend searching/filtering figured out, now its just a matter of making a front end for it (which will probably be harder then making the backend... at least if you want it to be usable by people who didn't write it )

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by razrsharpe

i believe its a bug... in version 1.00 all the filters are exclusive... although i would think by excluding IR recording you should still be able to include Imported TV... but apparently not... mmm ill take a quick look to see if its something simple...

version 2.0 will include a drastic (read major and awesome) upgrade to the searching/filtering aspects of TVE so if the bug is something more then a minor typo im reluctant to fix it at this point with 2.0 getting closer and closer

Definitely makes sense not to put too much effort into fixing something like this in 1.0. Certainly not a big deal to have a few more shows listed. I'd much rather you spent the time on 2.0 and Ortus.

[theiceman1973]

Reinstalled everything to get SMW working with the new patch to fix the directories issue. everything works great now except TVE. It now does not show my imported media. MediaType is TV and I have no filters set so everything should show up. Basically the same settings as before but nothing at all shows up. I'm running 6.6.2 with sagemc 6.3.9b 1, BMT 3.1, 1.44 and SMW 4.01.

Everything works but TVE. What could it be?

Sorry. With sagemc 6.3.9b 12.

[PLUCKYHD]

Did tve work before applying patch for smw?

If it did that is odd because the patch doesn't (read shouldn't) affect anything outside of smw.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by theiceman1973

Reinstalled everything to get SMW working with the new patch to fix the directories issue. everything works great now except TVE. It now does not show my imported media. MediaType is TV and I have no filters set so everything should show up. Basically the same settings as before but nothing at all shows up. I'm running 6.6.2 with sagemc 6.3.9b 1, BMT 3.1, 1.44 and SMW 4.01.

Everything works but TVE. What could it be?

Try downloading the complete xml of smw r4.01 the patch is having issues for some reason.

[bones71]

First off I would like to thank you for this great plugin. and for recomending it to me in the bmt thread. I seem to be having a small problem with the filters though. I asked in the other thread if I could still use Archive my wife archives shows after she has watched them so I know I can watch and delete them, but if I turn on the archive filter to not show archived recordings it doesn't show imported files (not imported just in video library) and there doesn't seem to be a way to mark imports as archived or not. Would love to be able to use this great plugin but need to be able to have the two different ways to view the shows archived or not archived.

[razrsharpe]

Originally Posted by bones71

First off I would like to thank you for this great plugin. and for recomending it to me in the bmt thread. I seem to be having a small problem with the filters though. I asked in the other thread if I could still use Archive my wife archives shows after she has watched them so I know I can watch and delete them, but if I turn on the archive filter to not show archived recordings it doesn't show imported files (not imported just in video library) and there doesn't seem to be a way to mark imports as archived or not. Would love to be able to use this great plugin but need to be able to have the two different ways to view the shows archived or not archived.

first glad you like it (mostly)

imported files (files in video library) are all "archived" by their very nature. They are (and will always be) "library files".... that's something i don't have control over. Therefore, this sounds like an error in how the filtering logic works. However i can see what i can do to address this in TVE v2... what i will probably do is apply the "archive" filter to only apply to sage recorded TV and not imported TV.

[bones71]

Thanks, I can't wait to check out version 2. I love the dual pane part of it like the malore dual pane(shows on one side episodes on the other) We have been using the malore menu's since we started using sage in 2004 I think back ten it was mlbdude's plugin that looked like malores does now. I have used the alternate views as not archived and archived. My wife gets done watching a show without me and just archives it so I can watch it later I always check the archived view to see what she has watched and delete the stuff I don't care about. We have been doing it this way for 5 years and it has worked great. But now I would rather watch shows downloaded as they take up less room and are all in hd format. I need to make it not too different for her. You know WAF. But I love the way your plugin makes it so I don't have to manually import all the shows from the library, and I absolutly love the way it looks

[ranger]

Here's some background. I am new to Sage, actually still in trial period. I have been using BTV for about 7 years and now looking for a more comprehensive application. For my test, I am running SageTV 6.6.2, SageMC 639a, BMT 3.1, TVExplorer 1.0., SageMovieWallV4R1.01

I have about 2800 files in my video collection and about 250 of these are Movies, the rest being TV shows. I have used BMT to import all the files and TVExplorer to display. The problem is that TVExplorer can take 15 - 20 seconds to load up after I select the menu option. To compound the problem, if I am in TVExplorer and view a program description, and then try to navigate back the the TVExplorer window, the same 15 -20 second delay occurs.

Here's what I have done so far. Increased Java Heap to 768 MB. Turned off all Fanart and banners. Set fanart load delay to 400 ms.
I have run this on 2 PCs. Both are Windows 7. One is 32 bit 2 GB RAM (Intel 3 GHz Dual Core) and the other 64 bit 4 GB RAM (AMD Phenom). The 64 bit machine trims the delay down to 8 to 12 seconds.

Is this normal for a library of this size? If not, what can I check to speed things up?

I know it can load faster, because if I run Sage Placeshifter from an underpowered PC, using all the same configuration, the TVExplorer screen loads in under 2 seconds.

[razrsharpe]

@Ranger: First welcome to SageTV, hopefully you get all the kinks worked out

First some observations: Slow loading of the menu is not effected by fanart, coverart, banners, etc. that "eye candy" only effects slow navigation once in the menu.

Now some questions:

• What does your server/client configuration look like? Standalone server connected to with pc client? hd100/hd200? is your server also your main ui?... when youve been placeshifting is that local (lan) or remote (wan) access?
• Your video collections (~2500 TV shows and ~250 movies). Are the videos imported into the TV database so they show up as sage recorded content (ie in My TV)? Or are they only videos with metadata collected by BMT to indicate that they are tv and show up as part of the My Videos library in a default sagemc setup?
• When you say your placeshifter enters the menu much faster... (faster then what? access with a pc client / from the server ui / hd200?) This is accessing the same sage server with the same database?

While the menu is loading TVE is filtering the sage database (wiz.bin) for files that BMT has set the custom metadata field MediaType = TV. Then it performs grouping, etc on the filtered dataset (again accessing the custom metadata fields... slowing things down even more)... Unfortunately accessing the custom metadata fields is a SLOOOOOWWWWW process compared to accessing one of the standard fields. I have been working with Sage support to speed things up because i believe the slow down is coming from their end... so hopefully they can find something and fix it on their end...

One thing you can do though to see if TVE is generating any errors is to turn on sage debugging, enter the TVE menu, and then post the debug.log file that is generated.

It's weird that placeshifter is so much faster. Placeshifter offloads ALL the data processing to the server so the fact that its underpowered doesn't really mean anything for this test. If you access TVE from the server UI what happens? If i can find the time (been super busy lately) I will download a placeshifter trial and see what happens WRT to menu load times on my setup.

As a final note, unfortunately im not sure if there is much that can be done at this point (if the log is error free). Hopefully Sage finds a bug in their custom metadata field code and fixes it. Also TVE v2 should be better (i am using a different method to filter/group the video files that should be more efficient.)

[ranger]

razrsharpe - Thanks for the response. I had one filter turned on
Imported TV - set to Include.

If I remove all filters the delay in entering TVExplorer goes away. I'll have to check and see if that was why the PlaceShifter performed differently. I'll let you know what I find out.

[dead_ferrets]

Hey Razrsharpe, just wanted to say thanks to you and collaborators for a great plug-in! Looking forward to future goodness...

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by razrsharpe

i believe its a bug... in version 1.00 all the filters are exclusive... although i would think by excluding IR recording you should still be able to include Imported TV... but apparently not... mmm ill take a quick look to see if its something simple...

version 2.0 will include a drastic (read major and awesome) upgrade to the searching/filtering aspects of TVE so if the bug is something more then a minor typo im reluctant to fix it at this point with 2.0 getting closer and closer

@razrsharpe: I did some troubleshooting and determined that the issue seems to lie in the "include/exclude" filters. If Favorite Recordings is set to "include", none of the 3 below it (Manual, Intelligent, or Imported) nor the one above it (Movies) can be set to "include". If any of them are, then nothing shows up. I have checked just about every other combination and they all seem to work. To restate it differently: If Favorite Recordings is set to "include", no other filter can be set to "include".

Still not a big deal, but thought this might help you be able to do a quick fix. If not, we'll happily and patiently wait for the next version.

[ChaOConnor]

Great add-on, I love this! Quick question, the "Set All Watched" doesn't seem to work... is there a way to set an entire folder as watched? I've got all the Two and a half Men recorded, and as new ones get recorded it's tough to keep track. If I could set all watched and then when i see a new one in the folder I know I've got one to watch.

Thanks!