Automating UMC? (library updates, mark as read)

[flipz]

Hey all. I have been a PCH owner for less than 24 hours but I've been researching it for the last month, and I've had my eye on it for the last few years (you can see I joined these forums 2 years ago but this is my very first post). Previous to this I was using a full blown HTPC with XBMC that I was extremely happy with but I was looking for something smaller and less power hungry. I was pretty sure UMC was the frontend I wanted to use but when I first received the PCH yesterday I setup a couple of different variations of YAMJ, but it just didn't do it for me.

It took me quite a bit of time to figure out and setup UMC. Even for someone who knows a lot about computers, programming, development, HTPC's, etc... it was a pretty big learning curve. But the good news is I managed to do the whole thing without asking any noob questions.

There are a few lingering issues that I'm having though that I haven't been able to resolve. I am very involved in other forums in things unrelated to pch/nmt so I know how things work when new people come around so I will say that I've searched the forum, the wiki, and Google before posting this. Just in case it helps my setup is:

• PCH-A200 running newest firmware with one smb reading from WHS (\\media-server\Videos\)
• UMC 2.0.7 beta
• WHS hosts all of the media. My share has granted full read and write access to the PCH
• Movies are stored in ..\Videos\Movies\ and are mkv, avi, and wmv only. There are no isos or disc rips.
• Television episodes are stored in ..\Videos\Television\ and are avi only.
• Everything plays and works beautifully from PCH\UMC.
  

1) Is there any way to set a library update to run automatically? I can easily setup a job on my WHS to run a command, but I haven't been able to find anything on the forum/wiki/google about an automatic library update. I download new media on a daily basis and I would like it to be there without me having to force it to show up.

2) Should a movie/tv episode be getting marked as watched automatically after I watch it? I watch a lot of tv series (dvds ripped to .avi files) and sometimes I'll jump around between shows and seasons and forget where I left off.

3) Right now this is actually the biggest drawback for me and I worry that there won't be as easy of a fix/answer as there is for the first two. All of my media is already cataloged with nfo files, thumbnails, posters, fanart, etc, etc. I expected the first scan of UMC to be slow, but I really underestimated how slow. It took 3.25 hours to run a scan of around 400 movies and 27 tv series totaling about 1800 episodes. In comparison: EMM, YANFOE, XBMC, and YAMJ can all perform this initial scan in under 30 minutes. It shouldn't even have to scrape any info off of the web because it's all there already. But I dealt with it since I expected it to be a one time only scan. However the problem is that it wasn't only one time. I'm now on my 3rd scan through the exact same media (just to test) and it is going to take another 3 hours. This is with absolutely no changes to any of the media in the library. It goes from 0-40% very fast, then seems to crawl from 40-60%, and then it finishes up quickly at the end. Totaling 2.5-3 hours every single time. Is there anything that can be done to speed this up? Having to wait 3 hours to watch something that I just downloaded is crazy. I'm hoping I'm just doing something wrong.

Thanks for any help and thanks for an amazing product! It's so close to being exactly like my XBMC.

Edit: A couple more things.

4) Going along with my "automating UMC" questions... is there any way to auto-load UMC when the PCH turns on? Like say creating an index.htm that points to the .phf... would that even work?

5) I haven't been able to find any documentation regarding reading the .phf and related files remotely off of my share instead of off of the internal hdd. I tried simply putting the .\UMC\ folder in my share and running the phf from there but I received cgi errors that I didn't get when I ran it off the hdd. I read about people having the issue when running it off of a flash drive and that it may just be a permissions/chmod issue, but I'm not sure if it's even possible to do what I'm asking. That way I can remove the internal hdd from the UMC, without need for a flash drive either.

Thanks again!

[T800]

1: Not yet but it is planned.

2: You have to mark each episode manually.

3: The scan takes so long because of all the person info it collects for every actor. If you turn off download personal info in the library section it should be much quicker. I can scan 1100 movies and 85 TV Shows with 2500 episodes in 1.5 hours.
Locking everything when your happy with it will mean only new media is scanned.

4: Not at the moment.

5: UMC 1.84 and below could be started from a share but UMC 2.0 can't. I think it is something to do with writing to SMB shares or something similar that is the reason you cant.

(08-17-2010 07:27 PM)flipz Wrote:  Hey all. I have been a PCH owner for less than 24 hours but I've been researching it for the last month, and I've had my eye on it for the last few years (you can see I joined these forums 2 years ago but this is my very first post). Previous to this I was using a full blown HTPC with XBMC that I was extremely happy with but I was looking for something smaller and less power hungry. I was pretty sure UMC was the frontend I wanted to use but when I first received the PCH yesterday I setup a couple of different variations of YAMJ, but it just didn't do it for me.

It took me quite a bit of time to figure out and setup UMC. Even for someone who knows a lot about computers, programming, development, HTPC's, etc... it was a pretty big learning curve. But the good news is I managed to do the whole thing without asking any noob questions.

There are a few lingering issues that I'm having though that I haven't been able to resolve. I am very involved in other forums in things unrelated to pch/nmt so I know how things work when new people come around so I will say that I've searched the forum, the wiki, and Google before posting this. Just in case it helps my setup is:

• PCH-A200 running newest firmware with one smb reading from WHS (\\media-server\Videos\)
• UMC 2.0.7 beta
• WHS hosts all of the media. My share has granted full read and write access to the PCH
• Movies are stored in ..\Videos\Movies\ and are mkv, avi, and wmv only. There are no isos or disc rips.
• Television episodes are stored in ..\Videos\Television\ and are avi only.
• Everything plays and works beautifully from PCH\UMC.
  

1) Is there any way to set a library update to run automatically? I can easily setup a job on my WHS to run a command, but I haven't been able to find anything on the forum/wiki/google about an automatic library update. I download new media on a daily basis and I would like it to be there without me having to force it to show up.

2) Should a movie/tv episode be getting marked as watched automatically after I watch it? I watch a lot of tv series (dvds ripped to .avi files) and sometimes I'll jump around between shows and seasons and forget where I left off.

3) Right now this is actually the biggest drawback for me and I worry that there won't be as easy of a fix/answer as there is for the first two. All of my media is already cataloged with nfo files, thumbnails, posters, fanart, etc, etc. I expected the first scan of UMC to be slow, but I really underestimated how slow. It took 3.25 hours to run a scan of around 400 movies and 27 tv series totaling about 1800 episodes. In comparison: EMM, YANFOE, XBMC, and YAMJ can all perform this initial scan in under 30 minutes. It shouldn't even have to scrape any info off of the web because it's all there already. But I dealt with it since I expected it to be a one time only scan. However the problem is that it wasn't only one time. I'm now on my 3rd scan through the exact same media (just to test) and it is going to take another 3 hours. This is with absolutely no changes to any of the media in the library. It goes from 0-40% very fast, then seems to crawl from 40-60%, and then it finishes up quickly at the end. Totaling 2.5-3 hours every single time. Is there anything that can be done to speed this up? Having to wait 3 hours to watch something that I just downloaded is crazy. I'm hoping I'm just doing something wrong.

Thanks for any help and thanks for an amazing product! It's so close to being exactly like my XBMC.

Edit: A couple more things.

4) Going along with my "automating UMC" questions... is there any way to auto-load UMC when the PCH turns on? Like say creating an index.htm that points to the .phf... would that even work?

5) I haven't been able to find any documentation regarding reading the .phf and related files remotely off of my share instead of off of the internal hdd. I tried simply putting the .\UMC\ folder in my share and running the phf from there but I received cgi errors that I didn't get when I ran it off the hdd. I read about people having the issue when running it off of a flash drive and that it may just be a permissions/chmod issue, but I'm not sure if it's even possible to do what I'm asking. That way I can remove the internal hdd from the UMC, without need for a flash drive either.

Thanks again!

[flipz]

It wasn't what I wanted to hear, but thanks for the responses!

Thanks for the tip about locking the media though once I'm happy with it, that will definitely help out a lot. The rest of my issues are just growing pains from having used XBMC (or similar apps) on a HTPC for the last few years.

[Atinkler]

I know you're probably liking the looks of UMC but if you want an automated Jukebox (with some ported skins in the pipeline) have a look at Oversight.

Not sure if the coding to run auto scans can be adapted .. if not it's a great Jukebox in it's own right.

[flipz]

(08-19-2010 12:23 PM)Atinkler Wrote:  I know you're probably liking the looks of UMC but if you want an automated Jukebox (with some ported skins in the pipeline) have a look at Oversight.

Not sure if the coding to run auto scans can be adapted .. if not it's a great Jukebox in it's own right.

I was under the impression that Oversight was made for only reading media that was on the PCH itself? Maybe I need to look again but that's what I thought I read when I researching different ones.

[Atinkler]

(08-19-2010 11:20 PM)flipz Wrote:  I was under the impression that Oversight was made for only reading media that was on the PCH itself? Maybe I need to look again but that's what I thought I read when I researching different ones.

No I think it's NAS friendly too... although my media is on the PCH HDD so I can only confirm that