[DFergATL]

I have been using XBMC for about 3mo now. Today I uninstalled it and manually removed any trace of it from my PC. It has been one headache after an other, a never ending cycle of having to spend hours fixing things. At least twice per week something else would just break. I would go to work and then come home and something would have gone wrong. I got to the point where I would dread pulling up XBMC after work for fear of what would be broken now. I am not going to go into everything but today my movies would not work. XBMC at first started displaying all kinds of movies, but none were mine, some were foreign, but none of what was displayed was in my collection. I did a "clean library" and it fixed it, for about 30 seconds, then the screen flickered and it was all messed up again. . So, I removed the source, deleted the video dd and did the whole thing over again. I had to go back throgh my entire collection and mak things "watched" fix things that didn't scan correct... again. Now it will correctly show all my movies, but some won't play from the main "movies" module, but will if I navigate to the "source" in xbmc. At this point I just can't take anymore of it. When it works it is a wonderful piece of software, problem is that it breaks constantly and I don't want to have to spend almost 10 hours per week fixing my media center software. I'm not kidding either, over the last 3 weeks, I have kept track, I have spent 33 hours "fixing" my XMBC after some random thing went wrong. WMC may be butt ugly, almost feature less but at least the damn thing works.

David

[awilliam]

PEBKAC

[msarro]

kcubai

[mason]

Do you expect any help with this post? Or are you just trying to blow off some steam off?
Yes, XBMC is nothing that works out of the box, you need to understand the inner workings and find the personal setup of your choice.
Every error has a reason, and randomly reinstall, fixing and bashing will get you nowhere.

just my 0.02$

[leepenny]

PICNIC

[HenryFord]

I think it's rather stupid to throw those abbreviations at the user, you don't exactly help the case here...

I read a few of the posts he made and without a doubt he's struggling, probably due to some hacked together information picked up by luring around the forums/wiki/web which is incomplete and may be misleading.
The entry regarding the cached buffer size shows that rather obviously.

I'd be willing to help you, if you'd be willing to put up with it once again, starting fresh off. I'd advise to take a look at my guide linked in my signature - however, it's not updated for Frodo yet, but the basics should be the same and you should get a grip on what to do and how to do it.
XBMC surely is not the easiest piece of software around (a fact which is well known to the XBMC folks and they are trying their best to make it more appealing to a newcomer), but you are going to love what it can bring to the table, once you got your foot in deep enough. This, of course, requires a little bit work, but with guidance this should have a minimal impact, certainly not >10h a week (I myself touch my setup rarely after the initial setup was done, everything works well and nothing breaks randomly )

[DFergATL]

@mason

I am blowing off steam. But I am serious. I have removed it from my system. I was reluctant to do it, as I have been working and working with it for months. I kept hoping each time I fixed something that it would be stable at least for a while. But, it would never go more then 4 or 5 days without something else going wrong.

What the heck does, "PICNIC", "PEBKAC" and "kcubai" have to do with anything?

[DFergATL]

@ HenryFord.

I would be willing do a clean start again. I mean even as far as to format and reinstall Windows. Yes, I know it is rather like hitting the problem with a Sledge Hammer, but at least we would both know the starting point.

I have not tested a linux based distro with xmbc, mainly because at some point I was planing on getting something like PowerDVD to play all my "DVD and BlueRAY.

But, at this point I would accept just having a good stable setup.

FYI: The things I need/want in this.

Need: Hulu (love the Hulu integration with xmbc library. I have not had many problems with Hulu, only a few minor things)

Need: Better scraping of Music Artists. When I first installed XBMC I had some problems with scraping then suddenly it just worked. The at one point I had a major XBMC crash and did a clean install of XBMC, (this included deleting my setting/addons from the appdate folder.) At this point Artists and information that was there before just can't be scraped again and I can't for the life of me understand why. If it could find "Expose" and "Bjorn Again" two and half months ago, ,why can't it now? Trying to use something other then the default scrapper now results in major frustration and no artist information of any kind for anyone. FYI - Also tried Plex and their artist scraping can still find things that XBMCs used to but can't anymore.

Want: Cinema Experence Script: Honestly this works fine for me, never any problem.

Skin: ACE


Also, yes I have been all over the place trying to learn how to use XBMC. Until this year I had never even bothered with any of it because I had Tivo. Want to ditch the Tivo and their under powered hardware, expensive hardware and buggy software. I tried WMC, butt ugly, didn't like it. Tried Plex, love PlexWeb but Plex Home Theater does not meet my needs. XBMC looked like exactly what I wanted but more complicated to setup then maybe Plex, or WMC. What I have found is a really nice piece of software and a nightmare of setup. Documentation that goes beyond just the basic setup is hard to find. Information is incomplete when I can find it, or I start using directions only to discover they are outdated. But, honestly this is a common issue with almost all open source software and hardly unique to XBMC. But, makes being a newbie a nightmare.

One more thing. I have the corrupted, nightmare of a video db if anyone wants to look at it.

[saitoh183]

If you want XBMC to work for you, first step is to make sure the content you will be adding is properly named and your folder structure proper. If you will be using multiple XBMC machines and want the same content everywhere, then you need MySQL 5.5.x. Start off small, add your sources, and just make sure they work. once that is done, move on to tweak 1 section at a time.

[DFergATL]

@ Saitoh

My moves, tv series worked fine until the problem yesterday. Music is my biggest issues, can you point me to where I can find the "Properly Named and folder structure stuff?"

[saitoh183]

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Add...he_library

Section 4 is the most important if you want music to work right but read it all and dont be afraid to ask questions and give examples so we can help you out . Also posting a debug log (http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Log_file) is essential when you have problem. post them on xbmclogs.org or pastbin.com and then you post your link to them.

[navig8r]

I don't really have any information to add right now, I just wanted to say after reading this entire post it amazes me at how helpful everyone is. You all (well most) really stepped up and save someone from totally abandoning the BEST home media software out there, you could have easily turned your backs on this person...this made me feel good on a bad day.

[DFergATL]

@saitoh183

I will be more then happy to do that. But, I would like someone to at least try to explane to me why I have to do that now, when I didn't a few months ago, when it worked fine.

[saitoh183]

Cant really answer that without a log to give insight on what is going on under the hood. Speaking from personal experience, I dont use XBMC for music (yet) but im still in the process of fixing my music up to get a proper import on the first try. As for my TVshows and Movies, I fixed every single Tvshow and movie i had (artwork, moviesets, information) then did a export into individual folders and then using Goodsync, isent all the NFOs and artwork to a xbmc backup area i made that has the same folder structure as my main video folder but only contains NFOs and artwork. Every week i have a batch job that updates this backup by launching goodsync (restores all nfo and artwork to my main video folder), send a export library command (via powershell script) to export only new movies and tvshow(overwrite False) and then execute goodsync again to backup. Every beginning of the month it does the same thing except that Overwrite is on so that it updates all nfo files with there latest watched and resume status. With theses 2 Scheduled Task, if ever i need to redo my library, i just restore using goodsync and then create the new library. It willuse my nfos and i will be 100% sure to have the same library i had before with no surprises. One my Music is ready to be added to XBMC, i will add them to this backup process so that i any library recreation will yield the same result.

I, like you, got tired of always having random bugs/problems with my library, so I took the time to get it right once and then export my library info knowing its clean and works. I can tell that since doing this, when a bug arises, its alot easier to troubleshoot knowing that i can rule out nfo and artwork problems. As for my backup system, well thats just mean taking means to not ever have to restart the process of getting things right.

[whitebelly]

Typically, music library issues are 99% improper tagging related. Folder names mean little, but organizing with separate folders for each album is usually the easiest way to go.

As for movies.

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Vid...les/Movies