Confirmation of 3.5.1 Slowness

[zhuei]

Well the theory was going around that having a lot of videos recorded under multiple folders would slow down your system just proved itself true to me. I deleted about 400 episodes of shows bringing my total # of shows to about 200. NOw the interface is fast again. Its really time to improve beyond the damn XML file for show information storage. Partner with MYSQL its free damnit. A video DATABASE deserves a real database.

Also make sure to mark newly showsqueezed WMV files as "previously watched" if their parent MPG was already watched. This flag should carry over and its annoying that it doesnt.

[Rich A]

Originally Posted by zhuei

Well the theory was going around that having a lot of videos recorded under multiple folders would slow down your system just proved itself true to me. I deleted about 400 episodes of shows bringing my total # of shows to about 200. NOw the interface is fast again. Its really time to improve beyond the damn XML file for show information storage. Partner with MYSQL its free damnit. A video DATABASE deserves a real database.

Also make sure to mark newly showsqueezed WMV files as "previously watched" if their parent MPG was already watched. This flag should carry over and its annoying that it doesnt.

I'm curious about the large number of shows being stored. Was thinking of doing something like a large video server. Are those one hour shows or half hour shows on average? In either case to fit 400 of them on a 160 GB drive would mean they might be pretty small. Are you showsqueezing them?

Here I also have a 160 GB drive dedicated just for recorded shows. But I use a very high bit rate mpeg-2 and have been archiving favorites to DVD. I'm just wondering what kind of storage I would need to put my whole collection on hard disk(s) ... How's the quality of what you have stored?

Frankly the DVDs are starting to "pile up". heh heh. But there's no way I could put them all on hard drives at the quality they are presently burned. But 400 shows in 160 GB space sounds great to me.

[zhuei]

My WMV showsqueeze makes a 30 minute episode ~325MB. So a 160GB drive with about 150GB of actual usable space after Windows, swapfiles, and timeshift buffer holds about 550 Episodes. I've maxed out, but it just overwrites the oldest shows, and i go in and mark ones i want to keep so they arent expired.

This and Smartskip are the only reasons to like BTV still over MCE2K5.

[Rich A]

Originally Posted by zhuei

My WMV showsqueeze makes a 30 minute episode ~325MB. So a 160GB drive with about 150GB of actual usable space after Windows, swapfiles, and timeshift buffer holds about 550 Episodes. I've maxed out, but it just overwrites the oldest shows, and i go in and mark ones i want to keep so they arent expired.

This and Smartskip are the only reasons to like BTV still over MCE2K5.

Ah ShowSqueeze to the rescue! Yeah I figured you were averaging around 400 mb or less per show. With the pricing of drives dropping and size increasing, I was considering something like a terabyte of space, which would be easy to do today.

By the way .. I've always gone with a rule to leave at least 1/4 of the hard drive empty for both safety and optimal speed. Are you sure you aren't exceeding the useful limit of the drive ? Point is, maybe it's not the "number" of files but rather the over-all size of the free space left on your drive? Just a thought.

<edit> Hmmm, just thinking. I think we can negate my second paragraph. While the amount of free space (or lack of it) can cause various problems, I think you are only seeing the slow down during menu navigation and not between various operating functions. In that case I would guess it IS more than likely due to the parsing of the large xml file.