Boxee Box as an extender? (xbmc perhaps?)

[darcilicious]

I've sent a PM to the "video guy" that is pretty good at looking at this stuff so hopefully he'll have a chance to respond.

I have the output of my STB set to 1080i fixed, optical with 5.1 audio being recorded.

Do you have a sample file (3-5 minutes) you can share?

[wayner]

Hi guys, the UI is looking great!

Is not being able to playback H.264 video files a known issue or is it a problem unique to me? I can playback MPEG-2 SD files and I can play back at least some MPEG-2 HD files but whenever I try to play H.264 files (which are from my HD-PVR) Boxee always crashes. Do other see this?

I am using Boxee on my PC and the PC is an i5-2500K Win7 64 bit with 8 GB of RAM using the integrated Intel Sandy Bridge HD3000 graphics.

[darcilicious]

Try turning off hardware acceleration in boxee (settings somewhere)

[bbenkstein]

Originally Posted by darcilicious

I've sent a PM to the "video guy" that is pretty good at looking at this stuff so hopefully he'll have a chance to respond.

I have the output of my STB set to 1080i fixed, optical with 5.1 audio being recorded.

Do you have a sample file (3-5 minutes) you can share?

Darcilicious,

Thank you very much! Your "video guy" responded with some great info. I was leaning this direction but it was good to know the reason why. I changed the output from my set top box (DISH VIP211) to 1080i instead of 720p and recorded a 1 minute test clip from the HD-PVR. It plays just fine on the Boxee Box now. I looked at the MediaInfo for the test file and the video fps is at 29.970 vs the ~60 fps previously. I'm going to update the HD-PVR drivers again and see if I can't get 5.1 to work using the Sage extenders as well (I'm pretty confident that will fix that issue as well). Thanks again for your assistance!

[darcilicious]

Glad it's working out!

[kmp14]

Can anyone see a problem with me not having my sage recordings go into a folder? My sage recording location is via UNC: \\192.168.1.26\SageRecordings. The actual path to that share is T:\, so I record to the root of the drive. I have tried both t:,\\192.168.1.26\SageRecordings, and t:\,\\192.168.1.26\SageRecordings, neither work with my new Boxee Box. On PC install of Boxee, it works without even putting in the share info at all. I will have to figure out how to look at the Boxee Box log.. I will search this thread for that. I do have guest and Everyone access to the share enabled. Any thoughts?

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by darcilicious

Try turning off hardware acceleration in boxee (settings somewhere)

Completely cured my problem with playing HD-PVR recordings on the Boxee software. Maybe this tip could be added to the documentation?

[darcilicious]

Originally Posted by KeithAbbott

Completely cured my problem with playing HD-PVR recordings on the Boxee software. Maybe this tip could be added to the documentation?

Oh good idea! I might have time/energy to work on it some more tonight.

Could I ask what hardware you're running Boxee software on? Thanks!

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by darcilicious

Could I ask what hardware you're running Boxee software on? Thanks!

I'm running the software on an Acer Aspire AS5750Z-4877 notebook computer, using wireless-N connection via D-Link DIR-655 router (set up as an access point).

BTW, your documentation helped me straighten out the problem that I was having with the UNC mappings in the SageTV for Boxee settings a few days back.

[debacle]

So what functions are curently available? Can I play my ripped dvds on my boxee? Whenever I try to get into the videos portion of the interface it keeps telling me function not yet implemented. I dont know if this is due to my mappings as I cannot see my guide or recordings either.

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by debacle

So what functions are curently available? Can I play my ripped dvds on my boxee? Whenever I try to get into the videos portion of the interface it keeps telling me function not yet implemented. I dont know if this is due to my mappings as I cannot see my guide or recordings either.

The documentation does a pretty good job describing the current functionality. You should be able to see your guide and recordings, your mappings probably need some tweaking.

[darcilicious]

For all non-recorded material, you would use the regular Boxee interface, not the SageTV for Boxee app. (I believe this is covered in the Intro section of wiki documentation but if it's not clear to folks, please speak up and I will update the doc).

Your ripped media files must be properly named or have NFO files and added to Boxee's Local Sources (or Local Files) and scanned/identified, or you can navigate to them over you network via Files>>Network (software) or Files>>Browse>>Network (Box).

To access the TV guide, you go to TV->Program Guide in the SageTV for Boxee app; that is also where you access Live TV -- NOT from "Watch Live TV" (neither of which work in Boxee software at all due to a limitation in the software).

Without knowing what you're trying to use for your mappings, there's not much help to be given in getting you access to your Recordings but the wiki has some examples on how to set up your UNC Mappings assuming your network shares are set up correctly.

If you still need help, post exactly what you're trying to do and exactly how you've entered your UNC Mappings.

[bkavanaugh]

I finally got around to installing the app - from the repository - on a Boxee Box today, following the instructions here. I thought from reading this that, as long as I had the recording paths set up as UNC paths in Sage, I would be fine. However, I'm getting "The media source or file is not accessible" whenever I click on one of the items.

1) The permissions on all of the shares are Everyone/full control (this is in a Windows active directory domain, but I'm able to access these files in other non-Windows applications like via my Xoom)
2) They are in Sage as \\ServerName\Directory - which I thought from the directions was okay

Do they need to be in Sage as \\IPAddress\Directory? Do I need to map them in Boxee anyway? Did I miss a step?

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by bkavanaugh

I finally got around to installing the app - from the repository - on a Boxee Box today, following the instructions here. I thought from reading this that, as long as I had the recording paths set up as UNC paths in Sage, I would be fine. However, I'm getting "The media source or file is not accessible" whenever I click on one of the items.

1) The permissions on all of the shares are Everyone/full control (this is in a Windows active directory domain, but I'm able to access these files in other non-Windows applications like via my Xoom)
2) They are in Sage as \\ServerName\Directory - which I thought from the directions was okay

Do they need to be in Sage as \\IPAddress\Directory? Do I need to map them in Boxee anyway? Did I miss a step?

Mine is setup with \\ServerName\Directory, and it's working fine. Well, technically it's setup as d:,\\ServerName\Directory. The drive/directory information prior to the ",\\ServerName" appears to be important.

[bkavanaugh]

Originally Posted by KeithAbbott

Mine is setup with \\ServerName\Directory, and it's working fine. Well, technically it's setup as d:,\\ServerName\Directory. The drive/directory information prior to the ",\\ServerName" appears to be important.

Did you also set them up in Setup\Boxee (I'm guessing from the "d:,\\ServerName\Directory" note)?

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by bkavanaugh

Do they need to be in Sage as \\IPAddress\Directory? Do I need to map them in Boxee anyway? Did I miss a step?

The box probably can't resolve \\ServerName to an IP address and as far as I know there is no way to remap a hostname to an IP address, you can only remap a drive letter to an IP address. I didn't write that portion of the code so the author will have to respond. I'll take a quick look and see if it's something obvious.

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by bkavanaugh

Did you also set them up in Setup\Boxee (I'm guessing from the "d:,\\ServerName\Directory" note)?

Yes, within the SageTV for Boxee app, I went to Setup/Boxee, and entered d:,\\ServerName\Directory in the UNC Mappings field. The \\ServerName\Directory points to the recordings drive that I shared on my Win7/SageTV server.

SageTV for Boxee works fine for me using server name instead of IP address in the UNC Mappings field...

[darcilicious]

Keith, just to clarify, are you using a Boxee Box or the Boxee software?

Regarding hostname vs IP address -- I think it really depends. Boxee's network discovery (both on the Box and the software version) will use hostnames for the most part (I have Vista, W7, and WHS on my network and Boxee finds them all).

But depending on I don't know what, using a hostname in an app seems to iffy -- not just this app but the SUB-BOX developer also recommends using the IP address of the subsonic streaming server instead of the hostname...

However, if you can view the list of recordings, then the SageTV for Boxee app is communicating with the SageTV server since that's where the list is coming from.

If you're not able to play any of the videos then I would have to say you're bumping up against an SMB mount bug. If you enable debug logging on the Box and find an entry like this:

>>13:28:56.0442 T:2898258832 M:463450112 ERROR: CCifsDirectory::GetResource - failed to mount CIFS share, status[127][Key has expired], share[//192.168.1.100/Recorded]

Then you've hit a known bug.

My work around for it has been to enable Guest access for the top level share (\\server\videos on my WHS). Not sure what the work around is for other OS's-- I think bkavanaugh is the second person to run into this problem with anon/everyone access enabled...

[bkavanaugh]

Originally Posted by darcilicious

However, if you can view the list of recordings, then the SageTV for Boxee app is communicating with the SageTV server since that's where the list is coming from.

If you're not able to play any of the videos then I would have to say you're bumping up against an SMB mount bug. If you enable debug logging on the Box and find an entry like this:

>>13:28:56.0442 T:2898258832 M:463450112 ERROR: CCifsDirectory::GetResource - failed to mount CIFS share, status[127][Key has expired], share[//192.168.1.100/Recorded]

Then you've hit a known bug.

My work around for it has been to enable Guest access for the top level share (\\server\videos on my WHS). Not sure what the work around is for other OS's-- I think bkavanaugh is the second person to run into this problem with anon/everyone access enabled...

I will turn on debug logging and try enabling guest access (is read only enough?) on the various shares involved tomorrow. The SageTV server is running on a Win7 machine, so hopefully the differences between that and WHS are minimal.

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by darcilicious

Keith, just to clarify, are you using a Boxee Box or the Boxee software?

Boxee software.