WTB: Complete, Ready to Go System
#16
smalla Wrote:hey, do i get audio over HDMI from the MAC?

thx,

With the new Mac Mini that actually has an HDMI port, yes.
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#17
ok cool where do i buy one? local apple store or are there better ways to get one at a reasonable price? (i live in belgium, and can order from Europe without customs charges...)
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#18
My Goodness...

You guys are awesome... I almost didn't post at all for fear of flaming.

Maybe I'm just a knuckle head, but I've sure had problems getting XBMC the way I'd like it. I find the blogs/forum searches to always bring me results based on old versions - so when I try and apply the forum advice, I'm screwed.

For example, I was watching the great series of Noob videos by iMeAgainstTheWorldi (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKlRjyhJh4M). Of course, since November, the whole thing has changed, so you have to go to his website to see the more recent versions of the videos, but they're somehow also outdated. Applying a skin was supposed to be easy, and definately worth a little time... but it took HOURS to get it working semi-correctly.

I downloaded the skin (Aeon) and was supposed to put it in a particular folder... but the folder didn't exist... So I monkey around creating the folder, then discover there's now some Dot Notation type folders... So I create a new folder called skin.aeon.... and sure enough the damn thing still doesn't work. I hunt around the forums a bit longer and discover there's an addon.xml file required - I try to create one using the Wiki... what a waste of time that turned out to be... I tried to find a downloadable one to match Aeon, figuring I'm not the first one to run into this... but no luck.

My final solution was to cut the one from the skin.confluence and paste it in the skin.aeon folder. I think XBMC still sees it as "Confluence" but it displays Aeon now. Maybe it's just me, but that seemed to be a crazy complex task. I realize that the software updates required the changes, but maybe the forums need to clearly be sorted by version or something. Getting bad data and trying to figure it out is incredibly frustrating.

Another example has been the damn codecs. I tried XBMC out a while ago on an older computer and I could never get enough codecs working to make it worth my while (less than 50% of my movies would play). So, I finally found out about this SVN thing and a Community Codec Package (I still don't even know what SVN stands for, but it seemed to be a complete package).

So I loaded the SVN thingee... and sure enough, all my videos play fine... provided you only want to LISTEN to them. They all have audio now... but visual is plain white. So, I learn about KMPlayer and how some people have been able to get KMPlayer to play their movies. Excitedly, I download KMPlayer and absolutely love that it plays everything I can throw at it... but wait... I can't get XBMC to launch KMPlayer... No matter what I do to the damn XML files, it won't run...

Luckly I came across someone who mentioned something about pixel shader and getting some other SVN that is setup in some other fashion... and I download that... By now I've been monkeying with this stupid thing for 20 hours or so - and knowing full well that Windows Media Player can play basically all of my stuff without issue...

So I get the new version loaded, and sure enough, it works... But I can only see movies in the File mode... No clue how to make the Library work... I figure out how to add one file at a time, but that seems hopeless.... So I search the wiki and it tells me the solution - the "Context Menu"... but fails to mention how the hell you find the Context Menu... Finally, I find a hotkey sheet and that helped.

But now I need to get all the backgrounds and cool stuff to make it look pretty... So I search the forums some more and learn about a whole ton of software packages. Unfortunately, my experiences there were no better:

EMBER - Installed it about a dozen times on three different computers. Haven't had it actually run once. Most of the time the installation stops, no errors - and no executables. When I do get the executable, it won't run (don't remember the error).

Media Companion - This seems to work pretty well.... Probably the best of the bunch. It does often ask if I want to save changes as I move around the interface, though I've made no changes. It also errors with "Unhandled exception" but otherwise, pretty solid.

Media Info Plus - Seems to be working okay, but with commands like "PreCache" and "AutoPilot" it's almost impossible to know what to do. It also seems to download new stuff no matter what you click on - as if it stores nothing, ever.

XBNE worked awesome the first time I ran it... Now it errors and crashes any time I try to do much of anything. I've loaded it on two other computers and still can't get it to download the goods - something about "The security mechanism has..." and then it falls into some other language (French?) that I can't read.

I've only dealt with my movies so far... Can't imagine how much more difficult this will be with Television. I still can't find a program like Metatogger for movies. Metatogger will auto-identify (through some kind of file fingerprint) what songs you have, intelligently rename them (with folder structure and everything), download all the goods, and make the world a better place. :-)

Looks like I've gotta do the file folder thing myself, unless you guys know a good program to do all this for movies and television. And I have no idea how to get Trailers or a half dozen fan arts per movie as I've been recommended in those YouTube videos that really seemed promising.

I also have some error about some "Recently Found" script that fails every time I launch XBMC. I saw it's in the XML for Confluence that I've forced to run Aeon, so I could probably tinker with it, but I'm just worn out.

So, that's why I'm looking for a "Set it and Forget it" type solution. I've already got an Unraid box, that while reliable for the past year or so, is still far beyond my knowledge to handle should even the tiniest thing go wrong.

It reminds me of the old Windows 95 days when you could change your video resolution because it seemed like a good idea - and then poof... No more video for you ever again... (You had to power down, reboot safe mode (knowing the hot-keys), and then you could change it back, reboot again and you'd be there).

I'm just in love with the XBMC interface - when I see the videos on YouTube, it's just beautiful... And if I could get it tuned to show movies and trailers and all that stuff, plus music (with lyrics on screen) and everything... Wow!

So, that's my lengthy explanation of why I've been so disappointed while simultaneously excited.... Thanks for all the advice guys... It seems that even the experts are conflicted, so maybe I just need to have the guy fly over from Denmark. I'm still not sure what to do.

Anyone even semi-local to Sacramento/San Francisco, CA or Reno?

Thanks,

Russell
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#19
There's a whole lotta info there, wow, eh not gonna address all that, sorry.

I'd post your issues with ember in the thread here or at embermm.com I've never had any probs installing it but I'd make sure all your .nets are up to date and stuff and then post there, it's really good for movies (I don't personally like it for tv) but none of those tools are essential.

I think most of the problems you're having stem from using the svn's to early, normally even though they say don't use them it's usually fine to run on the svn's but at the moment there has been a lot changed in the app due to the move to the addon structure and I feel the nightlies are really back so people can develop for this rather than for people to use.

I'd recommend going back to a build before they stopped the nightlies, if you really need to use the newest builds 29000+ then your gonna have issues for a while as most skins and plugins haven't been moved and there isn't a lot of documentation for the new features as they have either just been committed or still being finalised.

Whatever platform you ultimately choose if you want trouble free use with xbmc choose a system with an nvidia card and use a stable build not the svn and you should be fine.
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#20
Craig,

I think you're right... I think most of my issues with XBMC itself stem from two reasons:

1. Before I buy a system new for this, I wanted to "hump along" an old system and see if I like it - old system doesn't support shading or have a kick butt video card (P4/1.5gb RAM).

2. It seems that I've caught XBMC just as they've implemented a BIG file structure renaming which has left virtually all addons behind the 8-ball for a while.

I have no idea why I've had so many issues with the movie managers, except that they're mostly home-brew solutions. Two in particular aren't based in English, which has kept me confused. But I've tried them on everything from a quadcore 8GB XP64 to a new laptop with 8GB of RAM on Win7.

Thanks so much everyone,

Russell
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