STV Import: Sage Movie Wall (SMW)

[crusader]

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

Glad to hear you got it working.

Does not for me :-( . Any attempt to update fanart results in "locking" directory from drilling.

Btw another case of 'back-button' problem:
- on SMW homepage go to Categories menu
- select any
- now press Back -- you'll see weird things (I see them, have list mode for wall and drill screen)
- it takes me 3 or 4 back buttons to get back to homepage and not a single screen I see on the way home is 'Category' screen

Tag screen mentions 'Categories' instead of tags (bottom part of screen)

PLUCKYHD, I realize you are consumed by MyMovies plugin which many people wait with anticipation, but I sincerely hope you'll return someday to SMW and if this happen -- can you have a look at these problems, please? Another thing to look at would be "Tags marking" screen -- it is really counterintuitive and I do not think it behaves correctly in some cases (at least in my SageTV).

Thanks,
Michael.

[lash]

Wow, PluckyHD you are working on another movie plugin? SageTV should be helping all you developers out somehow.

In that case, I'm going to drop my suggestions and just ask about 2 possible things I might be doing wrong:

1) How do I bring up the SMW Info screen from the small list?

The Info button doesn't bring it up like in list view (big list view) and the Universal setting to set the select function to SWM Info only seems to work in the big list. In the small list, hitting select just brings me to the default SageMC library video info window. Funny thing is setting the select function to play works in both the big list and small list.

2) Is here a trick to the unwatched filter?

I renamed my movie directories to get SMW working so I have no watched flags set at all. However using the unwatched filter filters out some movies (at least 6 but I have a huge library so it would take hours to go through it all). Funny enough, the 6 I found were never set watched ever, as I had not watched them.

Thanks!

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by crusader

Does not for me :-( . Any attempt to update fanart results in "locking" directory from drilling.

Btw another case of 'back-button' problem:
- on SMW homepage go to Categories menu
- select any
- now press Back -- you'll see weird things (I see them, have list mode for wall and drill screen)
- it takes me 3 or 4 back buttons to get back to homepage and not a single screen I see on the way home is 'Category' screen

Tag screen mentions 'Categories' instead of tags (bottom part of screen)

PLUCKYHD, I realize you are consumed by MyMovies plugin which many people wait with anticipation, but I sincerely hope you'll return someday to SMW and if this happen -- can you have a look at these problems, please? Another thing to look at would be "Tags marking" screen -- it is really counterintuitive and I do not think it behaves correctly in some cases (at least in my SageTV).

Thanks,
Michael.

The back button issues I am aware of but sadly don't think there will be any way to fix most of them. It is the drilldown/changing of menu's I do that keeps adding to the back buttons history and creates problems. However I did implement a "workaround" for MyMovies and will probably bring it over to SMW.

I still think the issues you are having with file-system are not SMW related but rather BMT/metadata related. Something is not right in your metadata somewhere.

As for future development at this point I am undecided on just how much further I will take SMW. The route I will probably go is a merger if you will with SMM. Allowing sage metadata or MyMovies metadata to be used (granted allot of the mymovies features will be missing). Although I am still not sure of that just yet. SMW was a great learning experience for me and I do have allot of hours into it. However knowing what I know now compared to then there would almost have to be a complete rewrite for a new version. To work the way I would want and you would want it too. It is much like Razor and TVE V2.0. I am just not up to the task time wise at the moment to rewrite this thing from the ground up. I will probably wait and see how SMM holds up and see if the need is still even there for another addin for sage metadata vs MyMovies.

That being said any major fixes/bugs that are found and easily fixable will still be fixed in SMW. There are a couple still lingering out there I hope to get to soon. (recent items showing online content and external player launching not working).

Originally Posted by lash

Wow, PluckyHD you are working on another movie plugin? SageTV should be helping all you developers out somehow.

In that case, I'm going to drop my suggestions and just ask about 2 possible things I might be doing wrong:

1) How do I bring up the SMW Info screen from the small list?

The Info button doesn't bring it up like in list view (big list view) and the Universal setting to set the select function to SWM Info only seems to work in the big list. In the small list, hitting select just brings me to the default SageMC library video info window. Funny thing is setting the select function to play works in both the big list and small list.

2) Is here a trick to the unwatched filter?

I renamed my movie directories to get SMW working so I have no watched flags set at all. However using the unwatched filter filters out some movies (at least 6 but I have a huge library so it would take hours to go through it all). Funny enough, the 6 I found were never set watched ever, as I had not watched them.

Thanks!

Small list has no info screen as you pretty much get the info to the left of it with the actor/info buttons.

Unwatched does not work in sage for dvd format movies.

cheers

[crusader]

The route I will probably go is a merger if you will with SMM.

Oh! I have not realized MyMovies plugin will be something like SMW -- thought about it as something similar to BMT. Well, in this case I am joining to the queue of people anticipating SMM release (and starting looking for ways to accumulate MyMovies points :-) )

Thanks!

[lash]

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

Small list has no info screen as you pretty much get the info to the left of it with the actor/info buttons.

Unwatched does not work in sage for dvd format movies.

cheers

Thanks PluckyHD. However, I am not clear on what you mean. Actually the actor info is what I am trying ot get to in the small list. Hitting the info button on a title doesn't do anything for me. Is there a button I am missing?

Ah, that may explain the unwatched issue then. These 6 are not dvds but bluray but I'm guessing they are experiencing the same issue. Thank you!

[lash]

Nevermind, I was missing a button, the guide button. That brings up actor info in the small list view.

However, I found a few more movies that got filtered out as watched and they were unwatched and are mkvs. Any idea why this may be happening?

Thanks!

[Islander]

I changed the fanart filter so that the media without fanart do not appear when the None filter is selected. When they appeared under None they just showed as a DVD and case and had no effect on the scrolling speed.

With the change, if I select No Fanart as the filter, when I go into the media without fanart screen with the media it is crawling literally hardly moves both on the server and any of the five HD200 around the house. I see the posters but it is very painful to navigate the view this way; is this how it should be?

Thanks.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by Islander

I changed the fanart filter so that the media without fanart do not appear when the None filter is selected. When they appeared under None they just showed as a DVD and case and had no effect on the scrolling speed.

With the change, if I select No Fanart as the filter, when I go into the media without fanart screen with the media it is crawling literally hardly moves both on the server and any of the five HD200 around the house. I see the posters but it is very painful to navigate the view this way; is this how it should be?

Thanks.

When you are viewing nonfanrt stuff with fanart stuff as you said the blank covers are shown. When you you view no fanart by itself it is showing the folder jpegs or thunbnails . If it is slowing down to a crawl you have a folder jpeg that is way to large and eating up too much cache. No you just have to find the culprit(s).

[Islander]

I see. That makes sense. Thanks.

[Mathelo]

I've installed the latest release of SMW V4R1.01 and I think I've followed the directions but I'm not getting full functionality.

When I select "Movie Wall" from the top I get a black screen with no cover art.

I can still bring up the options across the bottom of the screen and make changes but nothing I do seems to bring up the cover art. Now I should note that when I first started I had cover art but I inadvertently selected "Clear" on the menu, which is the only thing I can see that was different from before and after.

Any help will be appreciaed. BTW, nice piece of work.

Louis

EDIT: While I'm not exactly sure why, I did figure out what was wrong. Under "View/Filter" Options, Sort: was set to "FILE-SYSTEM". Once I changed it to "ALL-VIDEOS" I was good.

[MilkmanCDN]

Hello,

I've just gone through the rather lengthy install procedure outlined on the first post of this thread (Digital Home Blog), and managed to get SMV up and running. What I've noticed however, is that startup and navigation is unbearably slow. Startup takes around 5-10 seconds, and flipping from page-to-page on the movie wall takes about 5-6 seconds. I've done some reading through this thread and discovered that people are getting really good performance; but, I can't figure out how. Perhaps someone can shed some light on this subject.

My system details are as follows:
CPU: Althlon X2 3800+ (dual-core)
Memory = 3GB

BMT installed before SMW.
Using jetty server

Java JRE version: 6u19
SageTV version = 6.6.2.218
SageMC STV version: 6.3.9a
sagemc.jar version: 6.3.8
df_sageutils.jar version: 2.2
pheonix.jar version 1.43
JVM Heap Size = 1.0GB max

I'm using the HD100 extender with the latest regular release firmware (I believe that it's dated June/July of 2009). The latest beta firmware (Feb or 2010) seems incredibly slow and unreliable. I suppose that's why it's a beta.

Also, when I exit SMW and return to the home menu, the text and graphics look like they're been downscaled to a much lower resolution (think chunky graphics).

Pointers anyone?

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by MilkmanCDN

Hello,

I've just gone through the rather lengthy install procedure outlined on the first post of this thread (Digital Home Blog), and managed to get SMV up and running. What I've noticed however, is that startup and navigation is unbearably slow. Startup takes around 5-10 seconds, and flipping from page-to-page on the movie wall takes about 5-6 seconds. I've done some reading through this thread and discovered that people are getting really good performance; but, I can't figure out how. Perhaps someone can shed some light on this subject.

My system details are as follows:
CPU: Althlon X2 3800+ (dual-core)
Memory = 3GB

BMT installed before SMW.
Using jetty server

Java JRE version: 6u19
SageTV version = 6.6.2.218
SageMC STV version: 6.3.9a
sagemc.jar version: 6.3.8
df_sageutils.jar version: 2.2
pheonix.jar version 1.43
JVM Heap Size = 1.0GB max

I'm using the HD100 extender with the latest regular release firmware (I believe that it's dated June/July of 2009). The latest beta firmware (Feb or 2010) seems incredibly slow and unreliable. I suppose that's why it's a beta.

Also, when I exit SMW and return to the home menu, the text and graphics look like they're been downscaled to a much lower resolution (think chunky graphics).

Pointers anyone?

Did you perform scaling and image transformations on first load?

If not go to the home page and scaling menu from the options menu and do both.

The text and graphics garbled means your hd100 is being overloaded and I am guessing you have some large fanart that needs to be scaled.

[MilkmanCDN]

Did you perform scaling and image transformations on first load?

If not go to the home page and scaling menu from the options menu and do both.

The text and graphics garbled means your hd100 is being overloaded and I am guessing you have some large fanart that needs to be scaled.

Ah yes. I knew I forgot to mention something. Yes I did do all this scaling. I read somewhere that you had to do this to get reasonable speeds.

Also, my collection is around the 650+ movie mark.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by MilkmanCDN

Ah yes. I knew I forgot to mention something. Yes I did do all this scaling. I read somewhere that you had to do this to get reasonable speeds.

Also, my collection is around the 650+ movie mark.

What is your scaling settings? Are you sure you let it finish?

That collection size shouldn't effect it.

[MilkmanCDN]

What is your scaling settings? Are you sure you let it finish?

That collection size shouldn't effect it.

Scaling On
Scaled to 1080p/i
Small Backgrounds = 50%

I ran both "Scale All items now" and "Perform All Image Transformations" one right after the other (took about 60 seconds). My processor was pegged for a good 20-30 minutes after that. I'm not sure if by running the "Perform All Image Transformations" immediately after the GUI freed up after "Scale All items Now", stopped the previous operation.

I'll try running both of these from the extender tonight.

Thanks for your help!

[PLUCKYHD]

Yes do them one at a time.

Cheers

[MilkmanCDN]

Yes do them one at a time.

Cheers

OK, so I did them one at a time. After starting one, I would wait until my CPU usage levels dropped to a regular level until I started the next.

I then rebooted the server to clear the cache as was suggested in the installation instructions.

No dice!! The interface is still slow as molasses on a cold winter day. What's worse, is when I exit the SMW application, the rest of the regular GUI is now operating much slower than normal (but still faster than SMW), and I get the chunky lettering/odd graphics rendering. This can only be fixed by a reboot of the extender.

This add-on is cool and I'm willing to do whatever it take to get it working, up to and including <gulp> a reinstall of SageTV from scratch. I hope it doesn't have to come to that; however, I'm starting to get desperate.

Does the interface (i.e. the "MovieWall" portion of SMW) run blazing fast on the HD100? If so, what could I be doing wrong?

[PLUCKYHD]

I wouldn't say "blazing fast". It I'd pretty good on the hd200 but can't speak for the hd100 as I don't have one... I did have some beta teeters with them when we were testing and I never got any compliants...it is normal on a extender for it to take a second or two when paging up/down but overall the speed is better than default sagemc video library in my testing. (with the same rows columns). Maybe you should try reducing the number of rows/columns and see if that helps. I have done some thing in mymovies to read ahead and backwards advance cache if you will but don't have that implented in smw yet. But even with that the extender can still only handle so much in cache.


Cheers

[Mathelo]

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

I wouldn't say "blazing fast". It I'd pretty good on the hd200 but can't speak for the hd100 as I don't have one... I did have some beta teeters with them when we were testing and I never got any compliants...it is normal on a extender for it to take a second or two when paging up/down but overall the speed is better than default sagemc video library in my testing. (with the same rows columns). Maybe you should try reducing the number of rows/columns and see if that helps. I have done some thing in mymovies to read ahead and backwards advance cache if you will but don't have that implented in smw yet. But even with that the extender can still only handle so much in cache.


Cheers

I find it to be annoyingly slow on the HD200. Solution probably requires a hardware upgrade ... HD300 ...

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by Mathelo

I find it to be annoyingly slow on the HD200. Solution probably requires a hardware upgrade ... HD300 ...

Then something is not right it is plenty fast on the hd200 for me and many others. Like I stated it is faster than the default sagemc in all my testing. so it should not require a hardware upgrade.