another thing thats kind of annoying is how theres absolutely no notification that its doing anything to your library. I have a decent sized library and when i add a network share to boxee it just says its scanning with no progress information. So i have no idea if its hung on a certain tv show or movie or if its just plugging along ok. XBMC gives you a real nice notification of exactly what tv/season or movie its working on.

2/9/2010 11:47:02 PM

Quote :

"I guess i just dont understand why imdb in xbmc would work fine, but not in boxee."

IMDB in Boxee utilizes a licensed database copy that resides on Boxee servers. XBMC scraped data off of TheTVDB (w/ an api) and other sites like IMDB. Boxee does not have to scrape data but as a result, the internal code that manages resolving media has been rewritten due to the different way Boxee handles data.

Due to the social nature of Boxee it has to not only manage your local media library but also media from sites like abc/cbs/hulu/etc. The existing component of media management had to be overhauled completely. It's not like we don't realize that making the user aware of what's going on isn't important (it very much is!). It's just one of those scenarios where you have to take a step backward in order to move forward. Old code was ripped out in favor of making things more efficient to how Boxee needs to do things.

An example of this necessity would be that XBMC only really cares about single instances of your media. Boxee has to deal with duplicity. If you have an episode of The Simpsons on your machine, Boxee looks at that and then goes out and searches the web for the same episode to give you the option of watching it elsewhere (like on hulu) as well as any missing episodes in your media library.

To summarize, it's all about making the foundation of Boxee strong before moving forward and adding a ton of features. The dev team has been working like crazy behind the scenes lately pushing out internal builds to resolve issues. I'd venture a guess that by the end of the month media resolution will be a lot more stable based on what I've seen lately.

2/10/2010 1:11:46 AM

Quote :

"another thing thats kind of annoying is how theres absolutely no notification that its doing anything to your library. I have a decent sized library and when i add a network share to boxee it just says its scanning with no progress information. So i have no idea if its hung on a certain tv show or movie or if its just plugging along ok. XBMC gives you a real nice notification of exactly what tv/season or movie its working on."

Yeah, that's a pet peeve of many right now. We had it in the alpha builds, but as a result of stripping out the code and the beta now utilizing IMDB it was disabled for the moment. It'll be back in a coming build.

2/10/2010 1:13:50 AM

In regards to combining instances of media, the way I'd imagine doing it would be picking something like IMDB or thetvdb as the authoritative source for names/ids. Then your individual content plugins (hulu/local content) resolve the source name to the authoritative id.

So you add the hulu plugin, it scans the hulu content lists, matches those shows to their tvdb ids, and then puts that into the show list in boxee. For local content, you add the source directory, scan it, regex the directory structure (showname\season %s\SXXEXX) and pull down ids, put them into the show list. Same for movies.


Regarding movie identification, most of my movies are laid out as Movies\Movie Name (Year)\Movie name.ext. Does boxee look at the directory just above the file for help with identification? I dont think any of my movies have the year in the actual file name, just in their directory.

2/10/2010 10:31:53 AM

DPK, I have definitely helped with alpha development of Boxee but have been too busy to help out with the current beta builds, although I have used them and really, really like where it's going. My big problem (and I know it's being worked on) is that I can't change how something gets labeled apart from trying to rename the file. So I have to wait to see how I like it later.

Thoughts: Something like MediaScout or MetaBrowser would be acceptable too, I just need some way to intentionally change content labels.

Another thing, Boxee doesn't support my Bluray drive but Windows 7 Media Center does through an integration of PowerDVD. In an effort to keep my wife happy, I need a solution that is integrated and easy, so sticking with 7MC for most of my needs right now but keeping my options open.

2/10/2010 11:23:43 AM

^

Quote :

"Another thing, Boxee doesn't support my Bluray drive but Windows 7 Media Center does through an integration of PowerDVD. In an effort to keep my wife happy, I need a solution that is integrated and easy, so sticking with 7MC for most of my needs right now but keeping my options open."

it needs 3rd party blu-ray software integration

2/10/2010 11:58:33 AM

Public beta has been updated:
http://blog.boxee.tv/2010/02/17/28-days-later-a-new-version-of-the-boxee-beta/

We've got over 500 bugs squashed with this release. The 0.9.20.107* line of builds can be downloaded from http://boxee.tv/download.

2/17/2010 9:13:43 PM

Manual resolve appears to have been implemented last night. Not publicly available yet, but saw that a dev put in a late night apparently.

2/28/2010 7:50:30 AM