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[stricko]

Hi guys, havn't posted for a long while.

I'm running MC14 and am wondering whether or not to go to v15, or somewhere else altogether. I'm increasingly frustrated with the performance of my system, and the thought occured to me that I may not be setup in the best way. So, I'd very much appreciate your thoughts on how I should might improve things.

I've got a media collection sitting on a central server running W7. It's the usual mix of images, audio files (all MP3), mpg's, avi's and VIDEO_TS folders. Approx 1000 music albums, 500 videos and 1000 DVDs. It's mainly a wired gigabit network, with wifi and powerline for some media players.

On the network for media playback, there are 3 dedicated media players (2x Soundbridge, 1 BT Internet Radio) and 2 HTPCs, one of which runs Windows Media Centre (under W7), and the other has my copy of JRiver MC14. Both the W7 server and the JRiver HTPc are aging Intel P4 boxes.

I've got WMP running on the server, which provides the UPNP/DNLA feed to the media players.

On the MC14 HTPC, the folders on the server are included in the library using network addresses (eg. \server\music\....). The MC14 HTPC works almost exclusively in Theater view.

It all sort of works, but the MC14 HTPC is increasingly sluggish, especially after resume (from S3 Standby). I'm guessing, but it seems to be spending a lot of time reconnecting to the network files. Also, changes/additions to the media library are not being picked up automatically.

Soooooooooooooo........

What I'm wondering is, can I change the setup to improve matters.... In particular, should I be running some variant of MC on the server to replace WMP, and then addressing the UPNP/DNLA service that this provides on the MC14 HTPC?

I've done a similar thing under WMP on a different PC. I'd rebuilt the box and was looking to add all of the networked media files into WMP. Rather than telling WMP where the file folders were on the network, as I had done before, I just added the UPNP service as "another library". Worked a treat and added all of the files very very quickly. Also, changes to the media library are handled on the server, automatically....

Is there a way of doing the same thing under MC, so that I can switch off WMP and have MC running on both the server and the HTPC? If there is, can I continue to use some of my more complex queries, with custom fields and expressions. Do these need to be specified on the server, on the HTPC or on both......

I'm probably a bit behind the curve on all of this, so your help would be much appreciated.


  

[JimH]

It all sort of works, but the MC14 HTPC is increasingly sluggish, especially after resume (from S3 Standby). I'm guessing, but it seems to be spending a lot of time reconnecting to the network files. Also, changes/additions to the media library are not being picked up automatically.

This doesn't sound right.  Did you make a change in your  virus checker or similar?  If it's watching every file MC opens, that could explain the problem.

Or a disk drive that is fragmented.

But if you're using it that much, MC15 would be worth investigating.  It is a lot stronger on the networking side.

[stricko]

Thanks Jim.

I've been doing a bit of maintenance, clearing update requests, defrags, reboots etc, and things seem a little better. No real changes on the security software changes recently.

But, I'm still interested in getting the best out of what I have. Is there any benefit to me of running some variant of MC on the server instead of WMP? I've tried it in the past, and the standalone media players seemed to work OK with it, but they are not giving me any real problem. Just seems to make sense of letting the server, which is very lightly loaded at the worst of times, handle more of the work.