According to PLUCKYHD over at thegreenbutton.com, "...mytv has watched and unwatchwd but not near as fast... [as VideoLibrary]".
I know some of you have tried both and was wondering if this is something the majority of people would agree with? I've not experienced this myself, but I know there has been a handful of people reporting loadtimes in excess of 30 seconds for myTV (which has usually been fixed with a simple reconfig, but still).
Obviously, if this is a common "problem" it's something I have to look into.
If you're in a team, you'll be able to blame it on your team members, and that's one of the reasons for working in a team, but if you're working by yourself and your program has errors, all you can do is blame it on Microsoft.
I sometimes have a delay when loading sometimes its really quick, i just put this down to the service doing its scan, my sql is located on my server and the media center is set to sleep when not needed..
I think people who use the other product are discouraged by the installation of sqlexpress, but the use of watched, and new episodes, flagging makes mytv the better product, and it wins over the wife in terms of usablity, the only thing that bugs her is the crash when you play one video after another.. but thats my fault as i'm a tv pack user.
Nah... I've always found JL's app significantly slower than mytv.... I also don't like the look of the app at all.
Is PluckyHD a commercial user (and therefore used the latest builds)?
From what I can see he's not visited the forums since back in March sometime, but I didn't think there were major changes in loadtimes since then?
There was some work done load times, from memory.... plus there was the comment about it not looking as nice. There's certainly been a lot of work put into the looks (and operation) of the application since the 1.08040 build.
Isn't that the one that puts metaData folders all over the place to store the images and xml files? Yuck. I could care less if it was faster (when I did try it ages ago, it wasn't very user friendly for tv shows...at least not in my opinion. Not bashing it, but didn't fit my needs). I don't like that it spreads the cached files all over the place.
Now, myTV can take as much as 5-10 seconds to load up for me depending on if I'm wireless or not. I wish it were a lot faster, but hey, its only on initial load, so I'm not worried about it. After getting into the app, maybe at most 1 second between screens after that. no biggie if you ask me.
About having to run SQL epxress, I can see the point of them not wanting to run it. Perhaps a "local" version that includes a copy of sql compact in the installer would make some people happier (since its more transparent to the user). Of course this version would be limited to running on one machine and you wouldn't be able to share across machines with it (unless you included the sql compact iwth the service and it ran on a server and let the clients connect to the service which used it's own sql compactc database.) Ok..I think I"m just rambling on now, so I'll stop.
Yeah, it's the one that leaves files all over the place..... I hate applications that do that.
Anyway, I've found that it suffers from the dreaded Vista slowdowns for networked files, so if you have your files stored on a server that's not Server 2008 (or another Vista machine) it's incredibly slow when you go forwards or backwards throughout the app.
Also, from memory, SQL Compact doesn't have all the features that myTV needs.
ok... In the interest of "science" I installed JL's videoLibrary. It is fast. Faster than myTV? well, no. I don't think so (at least after initial start up). Why does it "seem" faster then? Well, if you look at the transitions, VL fades screen out while the other fades in making it seem like its happening faster. Even with the time to transfer the information from the DB over the network, I see no concernable difference in screen changes in myTV.
Does it look better? Well I do like the background a bit better, but in Arne's defense, he was looking to make myTV seem as though it was a part of VMC. JL's app looks close to VMC, but it is definately "not part of it"
Now, about the file scrubbing it worked fairly well. I was surprised it found as many shows as it did. It didn't find them all, but it found most of them. There is of course no way from the UI to set the correct information.
There is also no way to set the banners and the 4:3 image holders don't look that great to me. I would prefer my 16:9 ones. It is ok, and it has come along way, but once again, its no myTV IMHO.
Oh yeah, and lets not forget, you can't use myTV Collection with it ;)
Now I'm off to uninstall it and remove all those nasty metaData folders :(
I'd say that video libary is faster as I'd gladly count the overall footprint of both apps - that includes the SQL server requirement of myTV, which significantly slows down my system.
Another issue are the constant crashes of the mytv watcher service I get on my Vista x64, which in turn lead to memory dumps for windows error reporting, thus leading to significant I/O on my hdd.
I suppose the latter will be fixed sometime with a newer release...
As for SQL server, it makes for very nice usability of the myTV interface, although I haven't yet seen any real advantages of the SQL basis in working order (stuff like search doesn't work for me yet).
I'd say that generally, myTV has a better user interface, the stability issues for the watcher service and x64 issues still in the current beta are a problem though.
I'll test both for a little while going forward, the spread .metadata folders don't really bother me that much (they're hidden anyways...). What would really really help me though would be more regular builds or at least something of a "stable" version of myTV, which I still think is the more future-proof application.
-Jan
It would be helpful if you posted these "bugs" in the forums or bugnet as it's the first I have heard of them. As far as I can tell the app/service is stable enough for day to day usage for the everyone - apart from those indexing a lot of dvr-ms files which does not like being wrapped in a ASX.
If you have issues with the service crashing or the app misbehaving these are (likely) unknown issues and a new build would not necessarily remedy them.
In any case - I wonder. Everyone who has voted yes; Have your tried disabling the "Check for new/old shows on startup" option in Settings/General? If not, try this and post back if that made a huge difference in application speed. If it doesn't - please post more details on where and how the app is slow.
OK, I'll post about my issues in the bugs forum, bugtracker only confused me in so far as the interface was concerned.
funny how only half the amount of people voted on this poll compared to the president one...
i have to say recently mytv has been really slow on my pc and i think its due to sql server stuff again. however i do wonder if its because my hdd is dying (bad sectors on a hdd is a bad thing? i have about 5% bad sectors on my hdd that windows is installed on, frequent freezes and incredibly slow response) anyway have ordered a larger drive for my windows install because i have 4gb left on that drive and think that doesnt help either.
does anyone know how to move a windows backup from one hard drive to another? i tried to copy it but it wouldnt let me.
not that funny really, ive never used JL's VideoLibrary so im in no position to comment, and id imagine there are more people who havent used JLVL than there are people that have an opinion on the new president.
try something like acronis true image, im in a similar situaton, i think the HD on my laptop is knackered and i need to move the recovery partition onto a new hd, unfortunately every time i try to extract true image my laptop locks up, lol
Yeah, the reason there was a lot more (four times as many I believe) who voted on the president is obviously because that's something everyone can have an opinion about. JL's VideoLibrary is much more niche than that :)
About your harddrive - yeah, it's probably dying. What kind of disk is it? Seagate has a very nice 5 year warranty on their drives :)
good point realised i didnt vote either! stupid me!
well i am ordering a 250gb hdd which is seagate but the old one is maxtor. its only 120gb and is basically maxed out which isnt great for the main os drive.
what would be the best way to install this drive? stick it in format it with my current windows os and then do a reboot, but to the new drive?