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Intro (on CMC forum) - closer to ditching WMC

General support forum for Chameleon MediaCenter (formerly MM Browser)
dsteinschneider
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Re: Intro (on CMC forum) - closer to ditching WMC

Post by dsteinschneider » Sat Oct 10, 2020 4:34 pm

I'm running it from the machine I do collection management on. When it's done can I copy what it created to the new Windows 10 HTPC? I'm ok with installing MyMovies on the HTPC but normally I remote into a single WMC machine connected to our projector to do the collection management.

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Pauven
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Re: Intro (on CMC forum) - closer to ditching WMC

Post by Pauven » Sat Oct 10, 2020 4:54 pm

No need to copy.

You'll run CME on your MM PC, which will write the metadata files to your drive pool. CME is completely free, no license required.

You'll run CMC on your htpc. It will scan your drive pool to read in the metadata files and show your collection.
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dsteinschneider
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Re: Intro (on CMC forum) - closer to ditching WMC

Post by dsteinschneider » Sat Oct 10, 2020 8:20 pm

Thanks for the heads up on how it updates - I didn't realize it just writes back to the folders. The way I have it setup is just right. BTW, I ran it from a second HTPC that did the updates over the network but it flew through 1260 titles in about 12 minutes. I'm going to upgrade the HTPC we have connected to a projector also so it will be a total of 3 machines.

dsteinschneider
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Re: Intro (on CMC forum) - closer to ditching WMC

Post by dsteinschneider » Sat Oct 10, 2020 8:23 pm

The upgraded Win7 machine is running faster in Windows 10 and the screen rendering is much nicer. This is good timing as we just replaced the graphics card and the panel (nVidia GeForce GT 1030 and Samsung 4K panel). Running Windows 7 on a 4K screen is painful, with Windows 10 everything looks great.

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Pauven
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Re: Intro (on CMC forum) - closer to ditching WMC

Post by Pauven » Sun Oct 11, 2020 9:03 am

dsteinschneider wrote: Sat Oct 10, 2020 8:20 pm The way I have it setup is just right. BTW, I ran it from a second HTPC that did the updates over the network but it flew through 1260 titles in about 12 minutes.
That's not bad at all, pretty quick actually. I'm guessing you don't have much in the way of TV Series or gigantic multi-disc box sets, both of which greatly slow down the My Movies API export speed.

Now that you have a full export done, you should switch over to doing "Changes Only" since the "Last Run". You can either run it on demand as-needed, or just let it auto-run every 15 minutes or so. Exports will only take seconds, and your exported metadata will be nicely up-to-date.

Also, one more tip about CME and the My Movies API: As mentioned before, it's only necessary to run a single copy of CME to export your My Movies metadata for all CMC PC's, but it can actually be problematic to run more than 1 copy of CME. This is because the My Movies API (and most of the My Movies app, actually) is single-threaded. It can only handle a single request at once. If you hit it with requests from two copies of CME on two different PC's at the same time, one will get blocked and error out, or hang for a long time.

This is one of the reasons why I went with the CME design, instead of integrating the My Movies API directly into CMC. Not only is the API slow, which would have slowed down the CMC collection browsing speed, but if you had multiple CMC PC's all hitting a single My Movies server at the same time, only one would successfully retrieve data. I think the solution to this limitation might have been to have My Movies clients installed on every PC, and then having CMC talk to each individual client, but there was no guarantee this was going to resolve that issue and it added a ton of complexity.

dsteinschneider wrote: Sat Oct 10, 2020 8:23 pm The upgraded Win7 machine is running faster in Windows 10 and the screen rendering is much nicer. This is good timing as we just replaced the graphics card and the panel (nVidia GeForce GT 1030 and Samsung 4K panel). Running Windows 7 on a 4K screen is painful, with Windows 10 everything looks great.
I'm surprised Win10 is faster, that's awesome. I wonder how much of that is simply the "new install speed boost" as opposed to Win10 being faster than Win7. I've always assumed that individual Win10 features were faster, like DirectX12, but figured as a whole the OS's were about the same overall.

I don't think I've ever run 4k on Win7. I do recall being very excited for Win10's resolution scaling enhancements, as Win7 was severely lacking. Resolution scaling + HDR enhancements really make Win10 awesome for HTPC's!!!

Sounds like everything is coming together for you real nice. That's fantastic!

Once you get everything finalized and have grown accustomed to CMC, it would be really awesome if you could share your experience so other users know what it's like to transition from Win7+WMC to Win10+CMC - here would be a good spot: https://www.mymovies.dk/forum.aspx?g=po ... 410#219410 , or perhaps here: https://www.mymovies.dk/forum.aspx?g=posts&t=46145

Thanks!
Paul
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dsteinschneider
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Re: Intro (on CMC forum) - closer to ditching WMC

Post by dsteinschneider » Sun Oct 11, 2020 11:08 am

We just 21 TV Series and some only have 1 or 2 seasons. I noticed they take longer to process than movie titles. I changed it to Changes Only so I think I'm all set. I was thinking of jumping over to the mymovies forum to report on my upgrade as my situation is fairly typical of MM users on the forum.

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Re: Intro (on CMC forum) - closer to ditching WMC

Post by dsteinschneider » Sun Oct 11, 2020 11:21 am

Pauven wrote: Sun Oct 11, 2020 9:03 am I'm surprised Win10 is faster, that's awesome. I wonder how much of that is simply the "new install speed boost" as opposed to Win10 being faster than Win7. I've always assumed that individual Win10 features were faster, like DirectX12, but figured as a whole the OS's were about the same overall.
I use Windows 10 machines for live music performance using software called Cantabile. Many musicians think it's nuts to rely on Win10 for performance but it's been rock solid. The developer has a guide called "Glitch Free" which just takes 15 minutes to go through. It's about turning off power saving features and making sure Windows isn't throttling CPU performance. I then run a powershell script that uninstalls most of the pre-installed Windows 10 apps. Also when I install Windows 10 I unplug (edit - unplug the ethernet cable - if the pc has wifi just don't connect) right after the install when it's asking you to setup your account. That allows me to create only a local user. I also deny all the tracking and assistant options. Except for the on HTPC I used for management (connected to our projector) I allow the ones connected to TV's to sleep which has been fine.
Last edited by dsteinschneider on Thu Oct 15, 2020 12:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Pauven
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Re: Intro (on CMC forum) - closer to ditching WMC

Post by Pauven » Sun Oct 11, 2020 12:00 pm

I agree, Windows can be pretty much a real-time OS with the right tweaks.

One thing unique about my pinball control solution is that and inputs are routed into a Windows PC, and my software processes the inputs and generates the outputs, going back out to the lights and solenoids. Just about everyone told me that latency would be too high, and that the right solution was to have programmed logic-level chips on the control boards that process the button presses and fire solenoids. But with careful programming I've found latency to not be a problem at all, and I don't even bother tuning Windows.

It actually makes sense once you consider that competitive FPS gamers use powerful CPU's and GPU's with 240Hz monitors and low-latency peripherals to keep latency in the low millisecond range. These are video games pushing half-a-billion pixels a second while simultaneously calculating game logic and events. My pinball software only has to process that when Button A is triggered to fire Solenoid 3, which is just a few bytes of data. Someday I plan to measure the latency, just out of curiosity, but since it's a non-issue I've never gotten around to testing it.
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