Is there any hope of greatly increasing the performance of populating the list of shared Recorded TV content?

Every time Media Center starts up it repopulates the Recorded TV List of content from all shared computers.

This seems to take about 1 second per program for most of my shows on other  Media Centers, though it varies a lot.  (I suspect secondary and external drives, which I use a lot of, are slower than stuff from the C:\Users default location, but I have no way to tell for sure.) 

Since I have over 1200 items on 6 Windows 7 machines it can take up to 20 minutes to complete.

This is really bad for 2 reasons:

1) I can't find all my shows until it finishes, and I can't control it's search sequence - a PC doesn't show on the shared list until the previous one has been completely added.

2) Low-performance machines that work fine once the list is populated are not powerful enough to play even locally recorded shows in acceptable quality until the indexing is finished - this includes older machines of course, but also my brand-new Atom ION net-top. 

If I just leave Media Center on all the time newly recorded shows do not get properly added to the list; I have to stop and restart MC and wait again until the list is repopulated.  Arghhh!  At least on faster machines I can watch local recordings or run shared content from Windows Explorer.

 

My first thought when I saw the 6 win7 machines was to suggest setting up a whs machine and store all tv there, or pick one or two pc's to store tv recordings on and see if that helps at all.

I don't notice any real delay when viewing recorded tv on a low power machine that reads tv from my main win7 machine and my whs (roughly 600 recordings).

Maybe others have also seen this problem and have other thoughts.....

Thanks for the reply.

I was hoping for a server type solution way back since MCE 2003 days but Microsoft's approach hasn't made it easy ro get there.

The obstacle is how multiple people from different rooms could schedule and manage their own sets of shows on a multi-tuner, big-storage server.  Extenders are expensive and don't make cross-connecting easy either.

What has happened/evolved at my house is that everywhere an HDTV has been added a Media Center PC has been added or repurposed to go with it.  Broadcast HDTV, internet TV, games and lots of cheap movie discs online have let us get rid of cable (which we've had the usual love/hate relationship with for decades.)  And they've made it way easy to add an extra hard drive here or there when storage gets tight.

We used to use 4 ReplayTVs and cable for TV and it did everything we wanted, except deliver a great big-screen picture, of course.

Now we get great quality and a lot more choices, but the Media Center integration just doesn't cut it yet. 

I'm not about to give up on it; I just want them to fix it so it meets my (I think reasonable) expectations.

 

 

You can keep pc's at the tv's with their own tuners and schedule recordings at each pc as you do already.

Each pc just needs one hdd and the other drives can all get added to the whs to receive recorded tv from all media center machines.

Whs pp3 added tv archiving so you can set each machine to send it's recorded tv to the central server automatically (or you can just set certain shows/series to archive).

Power usage is good too as all pc's can be set to sleep when not in use and recorded tv is still available from the server, plus you get automatic daily backups.

A shared guide solution would be great, maybe someone will come up with a solution once the new version of whs arrives.

I guess I don't see much improvement there to justify the cost of buying and maintaining a server, yet another PC that isn't even supporting a viewing screen or running apps. I already use 2 dual-tuner HDHomeRuns so not every PC needs its own tuner and any of them can record more than one show at a time.

It would make a big difference if using a server could be shown to vastly improve the speed of repopulating the Recorded TV list on startups, but otherwise, until Microsoft makes it possible to put the tuners there and schedule recordings on it from any client I really don't see it adding much functionally.  I have no problem plugging in hard drives whereever we need them or occassionally moving stuff around to rebalance over my gigabit network.

I'd just prefer they fix my slow startup problem.  Assembling a meager 1200 row database over a gigbit LAN ought not be this kind of performance problem - there's got to be some odd bottleneck in there somewhere. After all, media player loads them up in a blink.  It doesn't make any sense to me.

I would like to see some power savings but I have tried and failed to make sleeping and recording work 100% reliably.  They either decide to not sleep when you want them to, wake up when you don't want them to or fail to wake up everything when necessary - predictablilty of failure seems to be greater than of success.  As it is, we even record some "more important" shows in more than one place just because of general distrust of PC reliablilty (don't get me started on what counts as "more important" at my house.) 

My most successful step toward power saving has been the tiny Atom ION box in the kitchen; the blu-ray drive is really overkill there but the whole thing works flawlessy with HD and maxes out at 39 watts, down to as little as 4 watts idling.  I think that's my direction for replacements as some of the older machines die off.

 

Guy2095:

I guess I don't see much improvement there to justify the cost of buying and maintaining a server, yet another PC that isn't even supporting a viewing screen or running apps. I already use 2 dual-tuner HDHomeRuns so not every PC needs its own tuner and any of them can record more than one show at a time.

It would make a big difference if using a server could be shown to vastly improve the speed of repopulating the Recorded TV list on startups, but otherwise, until Microsoft makes it possible to put the tuners there and schedule recordings on it from any client I really don't see it adding much functionally.  I have no problem plugging in hard drives whereever we need them or occassionally moving stuff around to rebalance over my gigabit network.

I'd just prefer they fix my slow startup problem.  Assembling a meager 1200 row database over a gigbit LAN ought not be this kind of performance problem - there's got to be some odd bottleneck in there somewhere. After all, media player loads them up in a blink.  It doesn't make any sense to me.

 

Hi,

we have a WHS from tranquilpc here in the UK - it houses all our documents, music, photos, and currently recorded tv - it just sits there, consumes about 24W, but is available outside the home.  We have around 250 programs on it, and within about a second, all icons are present on the recorded tv menu.

 Currently we only have one media pc that attaches to it, but this will soon be increased to 3.

 

Guy2095:

I would like to see some power savings but I have tried and failed to make sleeping and recording work 100% reliably.  They either decide to not sleep when you want them to, wake up when you don't want them to or fail to wake up everything when necessary - predictablilty of failure seems to be greater than of success.  As it is, we even record some "more important" shows in more than one place just because of general distrust of PC reliablilty (don't get me started on what counts as "more important" at my house.) 

My most successful step toward power saving has been the tiny Atom ION box in the kitchen; the blu-ray drive is really overkill there but the whole thing works flawlessy with HD and maxes out at 39 watts, down to as little as 4 watts idling.  I think that's my direction for replacements as some of the older machines die off.

 

 

We seem to have sleep working really well here, but thats with the help of Slicksolutions.eu's MST rather than just using Windows facilities.

Our future plans involve using DVBLogics network tuners, so that all tuners are in the home server, allowing each of the other pcs to connect to live tv - as I don't plan to include tuners in all of them, probably just the WHS and the main media pc.

 

Tony

I'm guessing that with 1200 shows that it includes shows that you plan to keep long term and it isn't just your list of shows to watch and delete. Why don't you use a program like MediaBrowser to manage the shows you want to keep long term, they've done a lot of work to cache thumbnails and such so that it displays everything quickly, and MB provides other benefits like keeping track of where you are in watching a series. I use it for the shows we watch as series and/or keep long term, my recorded TV screen only has a couple dozen shows like The Daily Show, 60 Minutes, HGTV shows, etc that we watch and delete, so that also displays everything quickly.

A reasonable guess, but no, we have just gotten used to scheduling anything we might be interested in to record and then indecisive about what to delete. This after many years of having 4 networked ReplayTVs, Media Center first came along for us in 2003 and just added to it.

On the plus side, we don't really have a storage problem because we can choose to either delete shows or buy another 2TB for around $100 and plug it in where we need it. And we don't have a tuner availabilty problem since we've added the HDHomeRun network tuners and can even add more if we should need them too.

I'd just like the simplest solution for the few annoying issues we have left; for Microsoft to fix a few things about Media Center that just don't work for us:

1 - I can't understand why, but on Media Center startup it takes an inordinate amount of time and CPU to load the shared Recorded TV list of over 1200 shows over 6 PCs on a gigabit LAN.  This is on the Core 2 Quad as will as the Atom ION, but the net-top can't even play a show smoothly until the list is done.  Once it is done, navigation is no problem at all.  A related problem is that if you leave Media Center always running, newly recorded shows on shared PCs do not get added properly, they show up individually with names that look like filenames and no information in the database.  

 I think this is just bad programming.  I recognize bad programming decisions; I've made  plenty of them myself over a 30+ year career.  I thought that possibly though there is just something configured wrong on my PCs or LAN and have posted in the weak hope that maybe someone had a fix. (Or that MSFT was listening and would fix this  BWAAHAHAHA )

2 - We want to be able to choose to schedule and delete shows on and from other shared Media Centers.  We could do that with the networked ReplayTVs, if I understand it correctly you can do that with Tivos. Why not Media Center?

3 - I want Sleep to just work properly and reliably if I choose a simple "Media Center" Power Option.  I don't think that's asking too much either. 

 Look, this has been a shipping product for over 8 years, that's time enough for even my beloved Microsoft to get it right.  An inexpensive Media PC next to every expensive HDTV seems like a great practical solution to me.  We've been doing it and it (mostly) works fine.  But if it doesn' get easier and more refined the solution is going to end up IN the TVs and Microsoft and PCs are going to get cut out of the action.

Hmmmm, it seems I have a soapbox to climb down from...

 

 

How do you share your recorded TV? Do you use windows homegroup or have you included your networked libraries in the media libraries option in media center? The homegroup option is easier, but I was experiencing the same problem that you were. It seems to have improved after I added the network shares of my recording machine directly into the media libraries of my watching machine (tasks->settings->media libraries). Cant hurt for you to try. Let us know how it went!

Thanks mm60 for the suggestion; I think I'll give it a try.

A bit of reluctance stems from my missteps with shares and Libraries under Vista.

When I went to Win7 I crossed my fingers and tried to do it all with Homegroup (I am such an optimist.)

Did you first somehow undo the Homegroup sharing for Recorded TV?

If there's a way to get it wrong I am sure to manage it.  (That was the secret of my career success in the end-user support side of my job; there weren't many ways to screw up a computer that I hadn't done first and had to figure out how to unscrew.) 

 

 

Well, there are 2 big pluses adding folder shares to the library:  the list does populate really fast like and you can delete shows from other PCs.

Unfortunately you get 2 big problems too:  all the shows are always in one big list that can't be subdivided by which PC they are on and worse, there is no way at all to tell which PC they are stored on. 

The first of those is just an inconvenience I think we could live with, but the second one makes it unworkable. 

We have gotten used to dividing up who owns a show, who scheduled it where and who is allowed to delete it by which machine it is on.  I am very much afraid if we lose that information we will end up with some serious conflicts at my house.

At least the basic capability is there.  If Microsoft would either speed-up and allow deletion using the Shared option in Recorded TV, which works great for sorting, OR would preserve the source information and sorting by machine capability in the combined library approach it would resolve 2 of my biggest issues.

I'd still like to be able to schedule recordings on shared PCs, and I'd like Microsoft to provide a simple reliable way to have a power saving mode that supports recording and sharing. 

I guess while I'm wishing I'd like to be able to play blu-rays from Media Center too, like I do dvds, without popping out to expensive 3rd party software that perpetually nags me to purchase upgrades.  4 of our machines can play blu-rays, but only 1 so far has been able to do it well without paying for expensive upgrades (thank you HP).  The Media Center integration on all of them though is poor.

Hi

This maybe worth a punt if you have a wired network for your PC's:

I have found that on a few machines in my setup where they have "rebranded" Vista drivers masquerading as WIn7 drivers I have had to manually set the Media Type for that network adapter away from "Auto" to a fixed 100Mbps or 1Gbps (also try duplexed and not if available). On a couple of boxes (I have exclusively Asus motherboards in my PC's) this increased my network performance considerably and also solved a stuttering/blocky TV issue with the XBox360 extender. On a couple of machines however I had to resort to buying and installing a seperate NIC before the performance issues were resolved (still setting the connection speed manually as well on those).

Of course this won't apply if you are using wireless as I don't think you get the connection speed control on that network connection type.

Also I have the same issue where the recorded TV library gets rebuilt when starting on my "client" MCE machines even though the Recorded TV is all on the main MCE box in the lounge. Its like the Recorded TV library is dumped upon shutdown and rebuilt each time the machine starts up (I haven't applied the recent hotfix for rebuilding libraries, which is maybe another avenue to look into).

 

I'm pretty sure it's not the network, unless there is some magic router setting that super-charges Media Center library sharing.

The wired network itself is gigabit from end-to-end, with wifi-n only used by the laptop when I don't bother plugging in a cable (which is most of the time because n seems to keep up with everything it does, including rock-solid HDTV streaming.)  2 of the PCs are still on 100mbs because I don't want to give up a slot.

But basically, I don't thinks it's the network because I get the same problem between the 2 fastest CPU, gigabit nic machines as I do the slower ones.  And file transfers between them just fly.

My guess is that it's either some network protocol-type setting in the router or a poor programming approach by Microsoft in how they share Media Center libraries when it comes to lots of content, and I suspect it's the latter.

...P.S.   I don't think they were anticipating 10TB+ of HDTV spread over half a dozen PCs when they started their coding.  But they should have been.  That's really a drop in the bucket magnitude in an enterprise environment and of course they play in that arena.  I just don't think the big-league guys and the HomeGroup guys were talking enough to each other.

 You are correct about those two issues. I have just one recording machine in my house and we use the other machines as viewers. As such it was not so much a problem for me, but I see your point. You are probably correct in that MS did not anticipate the potentially huge volume of media files that could be stored on the network, specially in these days of cheap storage. The library build is probably not optimized for this volume and is working in real time which is a disadvantage versus the cached approach. Would it help if you networked some machines and used homegroups for others? May give you a little more granular control balancing speed in the case of the machines where the maximum recordings take place versus the flexibility of having segregated sections for those that do not record too much?