Turned that option off, and voila - fixed. Now, whenever you go into the music library, it's pretty much straight up. Scrolling through the library is now considerably faster too - it must have been trying to update the music as you scrolled.
So - if it's all working well, why the inverted commas around the word "Correctly" in the first sentence? Because it's not actually working correctly, but I believe it's working as well as it can. Problems continue to exist, but I can't lay the entire blame at the foot of MCE. For instance:
- When playing an album, the audio output will occasionally (IE, once or maybe twice per song) skip a bit. It'll pause for half a sec while the machine does something more important, then resume. Hard to blame MCE for this when the underlying hardware is so old.
- When playing a DVD, occasionally the sound will drop out for 3-4 seconds. The video keeps going, but the sound stops. The sound comes back, and it's in-sync again (which is good), but it's still annoying. Again, might be a hardware thing, but it's still annoying.
- Random reboots whilst playing a DVD. We discovered this one when playing Dora yesterday for the kids. Dunno?
- Random screen blanking. Every now and then MCE will get itself in a knot, and the screen will go black and blank. The system is still responding - plug a mouse in and you get the USB-plugged-in boo-boop! noise, and the cursor move fluidly. But even ctrl-alt-del to bring up task manager takes about 3 mins at this stage, so you're better off just rebooting the machine - it usually needs it even after you've managed to end-task on MCE.
- Random "Windows Cannot Start Media Centre" dialog boxes pop up. Oddly, they pop up when MCE is running, and working faultlessly. Leaving them there doesn't introduce any problems, but why?
- I've not uninstalled MediaPortal yet. Every now and then you'll flick over to the MCE machine on the TV, but instead of MCE on top, it's actually started MediaPortal, and it's on top? There must be a button on the remote that's being mapped through to media portal still? Very odd.
- MCE still has trouble with keeping it's window on top of everything else. It's disturbingly common to switch to the MCE machine and have an AV dialog (or some other warning message) on top, with no way to get back to MCE without plugging in a mouse and dismissing the dialog box. Annoyingly, the remote's OK button won't work for this, despite the "OK" button on the dialog having the focus. Sometimes you switch across and the Start menu/taskbar has the focus, with no way to get back to MCE other than attempt to start a second instance, which then doesn't play well with the running instance.
These currently are my main gripes with the system. The first few are easily blamed on the old hardware - I readily admit that I'm probably under the minimum suggested specs, and would be prepared to upgrade the hardware if it meant a better experience.
However, it's the last few items above which have me worried. In all the years that I ran MediaPortal (even through it's beta builds), I could count on one hand how many time I needed to plug in the mouse, and I'd still have fingers left over. So it's currently not looking so bright for MCE, I'm afraid.
I do, however, love:
- The "Now Playing" screen for music, with the coverart scrolling down behind it.
- Playing a DVD or ripped DVD is simple, and no need to muck about with selecting the right video decoder, or so forth - it all just works. Love that.
- The GUI design of MCE. At first, I wasn't sold, but I like it now - very easy to get around.
- The screensaver - uses your photos from your photo library - nice touch!
Bootnote
I dropped Jeff Alexander from Microsoft Oz an email about the issues I was experiencing, and asked for his suggestions, since he posted a few weeks prior about how much he loved MCE under Win7. He got back to me a few days later, and basically confirmed my suspicions. Running on 7-8yr old hardware that's well under the minimum specs just isn't going to give a good experience, no matter which way you slice it. 4Gb of RAM and a dual-core CPU seem to be the absolute minimum needed, and a quad-core CPU yields even better results. So it looks like I'll need to invest some money into the box to get it to perform how I want it to.
The other thing that Jeff suggested that hadn't even crossed my mind was to upgrade the wired network with a gigabit switch, instead of the hundred-meg switch integrated into my router. This will be a "quick-win", as it's certainly cheaper than the ~$1100 to upgrade the MCE machine, and should make indexing the shares a lot quicker. Also, it should take all the MCE/main computer traffic away from the router, so I might even pick up an increase in my VoIP call quality.
The good thing from this is that it looks like the main big issues I was having above are probably all related to the underlying hardware being unable to cope. Since I've uninstalled MediaPortal, I no longer have issues surrounding it "taking over" the session in front of MCE, but still experience random error messages popping up on screen, closing MCE and taking the focus. Library population is now much quicker than it was, but still takes too long to be usable, especially the music library. Scrolling through takes ~10 seconds per single right-button-press to move one album at a time. Again, a combination of increased bandwidth on the LAN, coupled with more CPU horsepower should see issues like this disappear, with any luck.
The items from the "Things I love" list above have really grown on me more now though - it really is a slick system. I just hope I can get it running right, and then will be able to really enjoy it.
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