[cadillac1960]

First post, and I hope I offend no one. Just trying to stay the course here, but need some issues resolved.

I am a total newbie to the HTPC world, so please forgive my ignorance on these topics. Have read great things about XBMC, but have had a very frustrating experience so far, and spent upwards of 40 hours trying to get this all going. I am sure there are threads I have missed because I did not know what to search for, so if they do exist, url's would be greatly appreciated. Here goes.

1. Originally wanted to set this up as a strict XBMCbuntu box, but have abandoned that notion for the time being. Reason is, no matter what method I use to connect to my NAS, the libraries for music, tvshow and movies will simply not update. They just sit there for hours saying "Scanning for new content" and never cycle through any of the files it has been pointed to. Maybe it is something simple, but I could take it no longer and could not find the threads that direct me to a solution on this issue. Here are the system specs:

PC (all components brand new as of 2 weeks ago):
Asus P8H77-M Pro Motherboard
Intel core i3-2105 Processor
Radeon HD5470 Video card with 1GB RAM
8GB Corsair 1600MHz RAM
Kingston 120GB SSD (divided into Win partition, Linux partition, swap partition and unallocated partition)
OCZ 600 watt power supply
Logitech k400 keyboard/mouse

Software (very limited installations and intend to keep it this way):
Win 7 Pro 64bit
XBMCbuntu (Eden)
XBMC (11.0 with temporary upgrade to 12.0)
MPC (Media player classic installed this evening because XBMC would not play any sound in 12.0 - even though it did last night, reverted back to 11.0 and sound is back)

Server:
QNAP TS-459 Pro II

HT Equipment:
Denon AVR-2312
HDMI Direct Connection from HTPC
Klipsch 5.1 Surround speaker package
Toshiba 720p tv (soon to be upgraded)

Would love to be booting to Linux and running it that way, but I am a total newbie to home based Linux as well (have worked on linux servers for years and know quite a bit about them) and not having much luck here.

2. Benny Hill. I feel like I am chasing him around in circles like one of his signature gags. I have 3 discs, one from Season 5 and the other two from Season 6. I have named all of them with the naming convention of The Benny Hill Show s05e01e02e03.iso. So that would be season 5, then one of the season 6 ones is named The Benny Hill Show s06e01e02e03.iso, etc. But only one of the Season 6 discs shows up and the Season 5 disc does not show up either. I have tried taking out the leading zeros on both season and episodes, I have tried using fuller and shorter title names (Benny Hill, Benny Hill: The Complete and Unadulterated, The Benny Hill Show: The Hills Angels Years, etc.). None of this made any difference. It will still only find the one disc from season 6. My scraper is set to TVDB. Any help would be appreciated. ALL other TV Shows and episodes show up fine in the lists. I have posted a debug log file at the following location ( http://visionvendor.com/transfer/xbmcTVS...Update.log ) during which I instructed xbmc to "Update Library" for video files. I have used my own server here, I hope this is ok rather than using pastebin, etc.

3. Lost In Space. Some of these episodes show a "Not Playable In This Region" message, yet when I play them with Media Player Classic, they play just fine. How can this be??

4. Just purchased 4 Patti Smith CD's. Captured all of them using EAC (Exact Audio Copy) in WAV format (on a completely different system). Uploaded them to NAS. Tried adding them to the Music library and it says no go. It has also removed some of my other Patti Smith albums now when I look at the "Files" view of the music source I have set up. I understand that WAV files don't have the "tag" space that MP3 and other formats do, but I have had a lot of jukebox software over the years and although it may not have been able to store the pictures and all the details, it could at least find the files and add them to the library. What might I be doing wrong here? I have tried the "All Music" default scraper, Music Brainz as my scraper and Universal Audio as my scraper. No luck. Debug file posted here ( http://visionvendor.com/transfer/xbmcOve...8_2912.log ) where I instructed the program to "Update Library" for Music. I have stripped out most of the other 1000+ cd info and left in Patti Smith and that which comes right befor and right after. I used . . . . . . to indicate the break points. The new albums, in WAV format, that don't get added are "Gone Again", "Trampin'", "Banga" (in WAV and bin format in this folder) and "The Coral Sea" (Patti Smith and Kevin Shields).

I hope somebody can talk me out of this tree (I am ready to jump) and solve some of these problems so I can stick with XBMC. I am totally opposed to using Microsofts built in MC, and although some other options look attractive, I would really like to get this stuff resolved in this program and move on with enjoying all the content I have amassed over the years. Thanks in advance for any help you may be able to provide me with, and sorry again for not finding some of the threads that may exist out there that could solve these problems. I am just beat from reading through so much stuff and solving so many issues that my search abilities are falling apart and I am coming up with nuts on these issues.

Cheers~
W

[jhsrennie]

Re q4: I use EAC to extract CDs, but I convert to FLAC. The FLAC format is lossless, in effect it's just compressed WAV, and XBMC supports FLAC tags. I use MP3Tag to set the tags in my FLACs.

[unabatedshagie]

1. You might want to look into OpenELEC, it's a dedicated XBMC build of linux. Go for the beta version though. As the non beta version isn't the latest version of XBMC.

2. What's your file structure like? For your example should be something like:

Code:

TV Shows
     |----The Benny Hill Show
     |       |___ Season 1
     |                     |___ The Benny Hill Show - s01e01-02-03.iso
     |       |___ Season 2
     |                     |___ The Benny Hill Show - s02e01-02-03.iso
     |
     |----Lost
     |       |___ Season 1
     |                     |___ Lost - s01e01-02-03.iso

This will give the scrapers the best chance of scraping them correctly. This explains the naming convention more fully.

3. Sorry, never seen this message before and a Google search doesn't return anything except this thread.

4. Again, your file structure might be the issue, the scraper might be getting confused. I tend to stick to a similar structure as above.

Code:

Music
     |----The Beatles
     |       |___ Abbey Road (1969)
     |                     |___ 01.Come Together.mp3
     |       |___ Help (1965)
     |                     |___ 01.Help.mp3

Wav files shouldn't be an issue.

[Martijn]

For music files having correct ID3 tags is a MUST!

[cadillac1960]

Hey All;

Thanks for all the feedback. I am slowly climbing out of the tree and doubt that I am going to jump at this point thanks to your replies.

Here is what I have regarding responses and solutions per topic.

1. I will take a look at OpenELEC. Thanks for the suggestions unabatedshagie. Any comments about what it's differences would be from XBMCbuntu? I may have solved the issue of the "Scanning" locking up by removing zip and rar files. In XBMC windows version, it would slow down through those files, but would make it through and sometimes prompt me for action on those items. Now that they are removed, update library happens in a couple of minutes rather than an hour in windows. I will try it in XBMCbuntu in the next day or so to see if it has solved that issue.

2. The file structure/naming for all my TV Shows is very similar to what you outlined unabatedshagie. The ONLY differences are I use a leading zero on my season folders, and for episodes, I do not use dashes and precede each episode with and "e" (for example "The Benny Hill Show s01e01e02e03e04.iso")

3. On the "Lost In Space" episodes being lost to region encoding messages, don't know what this could be and I will have to try and recapture those disks to get the region coding correct. Thanks for doing the searching though unabatedshagie!!

4. I have encoded the files in question here as FLAC's and adjusted their tags properly. All works good now. Thanks jhsrennie and Martijn for the feedback on this issue. I do wish XBMC could take the folder structure/file names and generate some proper library tags and db entries, but now that I know the limitations I am dealing with and how it handles them, I can work around.

Thanks again everyone for the help and when I am able to help with any issues I come across on this forum, I will do my best to provide the same.

Cheers
W

[cadillac1960]

I have solved my issue #3 (Lost In Space episodes showing "This DVD Not formatted for this region"). I tried recapturing the videos from the original disk. Played fine on my capture computer, played fine on the HTPC using Media Player Classic. But once again, would not play in XBMC Windows. Same message. I decided there was something in XBMC that was looking at region codes incorrectly and in searching, I found under System>Video a setting to "Force Region". I set this to 1 (previously set to "Off") and now all works fine.

Hope this sleuthing helps someone who has similar problems.

So the only thing that remains is Benny Hill is still being chased around in circles for 2 of the 3 disks. All play fine in MPC, all have identical naming conventions and folder structure. Any help on this one or suggestions of things to try appreciated.

Thanks for all the feedback.

Cheers~
W

[cadillac1960]

OK, issue #2 (some "The Benny Hill Show" discs are not being recognized) has been identified. Seems that the scrapers I am using (TVDB and IMDB) have incomplete files on "The Benny Hill Show", so several of the discs are missing from their db. I found this out by going direct to their sites and searching for the discs in question.

I will try to manually insert these into my library, and send updated information to those scrapers/sites once I have completed this task.

Hope this helps someone else out there having similar problems with items not being recognized. Look at the scrapper source and see if that is where the problem lies.

Thanks for everyones help.

Cheers~
W

[SirSoulBrother]

Regarding your OP. Did you ever get Benny Hill: The Complete and Unadulterated to scan correctly? I too have this set and it's not every episode and not necessarily in date order either. When it scans it's coming up as the Benny Hill Show and not as this collection so all the data is mismatched. I'd love it if someone could help me fix this. Thank you.

[cadillac1960]

Hey SirSoulBrother;

I have been out of the HTPC thing for a while, but am just now getting back in. When I figure out the Benny Hill issue, I will post back here for you. If you have already figured this out, let me know.

Thanks
C