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Looking to make some space for the FireTV using some USBSticks. Trying to figure out what size would be recommended on a full regular XBMC setup & streaming apps & some games. (Not to many of the huge ones)
I have not install XBMC yet. But want to have the storage setup. Plan to us the StickMount method. But trying to figure out what size USBSticks I should start with. Don't want to go to small or to big. Trying to use the USBSticks I already own.
It is for 3 Fire TV's. I can either go 4GB + 4GB + 8GB Or 8GB + 8GB + 16GB Or if XBMC takes a ton of storage 16GB + 16GB + 16GB. I can just stream larger stuff like movies from a network drive connected to my router.
I will install some games & apps but not the huge ones. Read somewhere that the XBMC thumbnails can take a large amount of space. Want to avoid Low memory issues from the get go. Any info or direction would be appreciated.
Send your thumbnails to your NAS, I have no additional storage in mine, not a lot of games on it though. XBMC, a bunch of addons, all the prerequisite rooting stuff, a couple apps, few educational games for the kids... Still 2.5G free...
That should work... Guess I should run naked until I am on the last GB on the FireTV. One of the FireTV's will be wired to the router. Got any speed hit from accessing thumbnails on wifi ?
I run everything wired normally. If I'm wireless, it's a much smaller library and wireless has not been an issue.
KarlP said:
I run everything wired normally. If I'm wireless, it's a much smaller library and wireless has not been an issue.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
By library do you mean local media. I thought the thumbnail issue & low memory issue was due to XBMC streaming thumbnails taking up a lot of space cause of quantity?
Well, I have two setups (Home and Offline profiles).
Home - This is my main profile, it uses my MySQL DB server for it's library, and SMB shares for the actual video files as well as the thumbnails. The library contains some 5500 video files, and the Thumbnails folder takes up about 2.5G of space.
Offline - This is a travelling profile, with the library stored locally (userdata\database) and videos and thumbnails being stored on a USB connected hard drive. In this mode, the FireTV is also a wifi hotspot for my tablets, etc, sharing out the videos.. Depending on the length of use, I might have about 100 videos on the USB drive.
It's a different setup though, you're right, the FireTV is all using local storage, it's the iDevices, etc that are wireless. That might not be a good example to answer your question, however those same iDevices while at home use the same large centralized library (and thumbnails) and they are of course wireless. They don't struggle with the Thumbnails too much. Yes, they are a bit slower, but not horribly. Honestly I figured it was more because they were slower devices than wireless.
But, yes, one reason why people were having trouble with space was storing thumbnails in the userdata\Thumbnails folder within XBMC. As you can see, my library could take up over 2.5 G of space on the FireTV is left alone. I didn't configure it that way for the FireTV, that's always been my setup. I've got about 6 or 7 devices that all share the same content, so it made sense to have one library to feed them all. Thumbnails being different on different boxes caused me to centralize that.
KarlP said:
Well, I have two setups (Home and Offline profiles).
Home - This is my main profile, it uses my MySQL DB server for it's library, and SMB shares for the actual video files as well as the thumbnails. The library contains some 5500 video files, and the Thumbnails folder takes up about 2.5G of space.
Offline - This is a travelling profile, with the library stored locally (userdata\database) and videos and thumbnails being stored on a USB connected hard drive. In this mode, the FireTV is also a wifi hotspot for my tablets, etc, sharing out the videos.. Depending on the length of use, I might have about 100 videos on the USB drive.
It's a different setup though, you're right, the FireTV is all using local storage, it's the iDevices, etc that are wireless. That might not be a good example to answer your question, however those same iDevices while at home use the same large centralized library (and thumbnails) and they are of course wireless. They don't struggle with the Thumbnails too much. Yes, they are a bit slower, but not horribly. Honestly I figured it was more because they were slower devices than wireless.
But, yes, one reason why people were having trouble with space was storing thumbnails in the userdata\Thumbnails folder within XBMC. As you can see, my library could take up over 2.5 G of space on the FireTV is left alone. I didn't configure it that way for the FireTV, that's always been my setup. I've got about 6 or 7 devices that all share the same content, so it made sense to have one library to feed them all. Thumbnails being different on different boxes caused me to centralize that.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sound like an awesome setup. But I don't have anywhere near that amount of content. I usually delete things once watched. Right now I am looking into this:
CWM Flashable: Mount external USB storage to /data and /sdcard as the best solution for the low memory problems.
KarlP said:
Send your thumbnails to your NAS, I have no additional storage in mine, not a lot of games on it though. XBMC, a bunch of addons, all the prerequisite rooting stuff, a couple apps, few educational games for the kids... Still 2.5G free...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Do you have a step by step for how to send the thumbnails to my NAS and have XBMC access them as needed? I think that would solve some storage issues for me if the mount script I have been trying doesn't end up working like I want it to.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2790246
That has all the info.. Don't forget to delete the Thumbnails folder on your firetv once you changed the location.
I'm pretty pleased with XBMC installed on my Fire TV, but it's not without its issues. For one, despite having a hard-wired 18mbps Internet connection, movies seem to pause a lot. I often have to stop, let it buffer a while, then resume. This happens with 1080p movies, 720p, occasionally even SD movies. (I think the wife is about to chuck my FireTV out the window.) But sometimes, playback is totally fine, and I'll watch a 1080p movie from start to finish with no hiccups. So is it the source file, or why do I sometimes have issues? I have no trouble at all streaming iTunes movies from my Apple TV. (Haven't tried an Amazon movie yet.) Is there a way to tweak the FireTV for better streaming performance?
You can try this -> http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Modify_the_video_cache
I had an issue where it wasn't buffering, but after a while the video became choppy...
I had to adjust... Settings -> Video -> Playback -> select Sync Playback to Display, then set A/V Sync Method... to Video Clock (resample audio).
KidJoe said:
You can try this -> http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Modify_the_video_cache
Thanks for the link! Think I'll try my hand at an advanced settings.xml file and see if it improves things.
On the lodi.wiki page, I noticed this tidbit:
>Note: Even if you change the cache settings in XBMC, that won't change how fast the video file data comes in over the network. For example, it won't make a slow server load the video any faster.<
Perhaps that explains the discrepancy between how videos play? Perhaps a movie that's stopping to buffer every five minutes is streaming from a slow or heavily trafficked server and there's nothing I can do on my end to improve performance?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Raymondo17 said:
On the lodi.wiki page, I noticed this tidbit:
>Note: Even if you change the cache settings in XBMC, that won't change how fast the video file data comes in over the network. For example, it won't make a slow server load the video any faster.<
Perhaps that explains the discrepancy between how videos play? Perhaps a movie that's stopping to buffer every five minutes is streaming from a slow or heavily trafficked server and there's nothing I can do on my end to improve performance?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
COuld be. I don't know where you are streaming from. In XBMC/SPMC I only stream my local backup copies from my "server" in the basement.
Just wanted to say thanks KidJoe for pointing me in the right direction. Looks like I've solved my stopping-buffering-stopping issue by adjusting the FireTV's cache.
For users with Fusion installed, it's a very simple task to adjust the cache using the Maintenance Tool's Zero Cache function, as outlined in the following YouTube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IU4C2WO5A
Thanks to the helpful folks here in this forum, things are sailing smoothly on my XBMC-enhanced FireTV, and I'm lovin' it.
Raymondo17 said:
Just wanted to say thanks KidJoe for pointing me in the right direction. Looks like I've solved my stopping-buffering-stopping issue by adjusting the FireTV's cache.
For users with Fusion installed, it's a very simple task to adjust the cache using the Maintenance Tool's Zero Cache function, as outlined in the following YouTube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IU4C2WO5A
Thanks to the helpful folks here in this forum, things are sailing smoothly on my XBMC-enhanced FireTV, and I'm lovin' it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I was planning to adjust mine tonight or so. Thanks for the link!
Instead of using the 0 cahe that can put more wear and tear on your SD which could shorten your devices life span try my adv xml settings. With this xml the only buffering is caused from server end not mine.
<advancedsettings>
**<network>
* **<buffermode>1</buffermode>
* * <cachemembuffersize> 314572800 </cachemembuffersize>
* * <readbufferfactor>20</readbufferfactor>
**</network>
</advancedsettings>
Thank you for posting your advanced settings. Yes, I too have moved away from the Zero Cache approach, and instead, implemented Advanced Settings like yours. I've got the buffer mode sent to 0 and the cachemembuffersize set slightly higher, but basically the same approach. The results are much better performance on the Fire TV. Greatest benefit: the ability to fast forward and rewind! :laugh:
Raymondo17 said:
Greatest benefit: the ability to fast forward and rewind! :laugh:
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Especially when streaming HD content.
So I use a Windows network share to stream videos from my external hard-drive to the fire stick.
Sometimes when there's a lot of activity in the video (I'm watching cowboy bebop and there's hyperspace parts where there's a lot of lines flying across the screen) the video will lag or freeze entirely, and will usually desync the audio and video.
Is there a reason for this and if so is there a way to fix it?
Someone said to place all new music in internal and then it will be recognized.
Another way is to clear app's data.
Really? No refresh option? Cmon Samsung.
Well I had started the phone over at the time of my prev post..right now thats 3+ hrs ago and that shutdown / startup was after a total data clear in the apps settings Samsung Music app storage, and a unmount of the ext sd.
I just think it is interesting to see the difference in the Samsung indexing compared to the vlc indexing for my music. VLC takes upwards of a half hour. Samsung however has taken over three hours and is not nearly done yet. Of 7 or 8 newly added music folders, still only 3 have showed up (folders tab allows for sort by recently added).
It looks like a 6 hour indexing job or at the very least 4. Probably 6 as I just happened to look down and saw the tail end of some kind of toast notification of passing the first 10000 song point of loading.
Pretty tarded app. REALLY needs a refresh button if it is this slow to index.
But it does look good scrolling thru all the albun covers.
Just had a thought...hope it isn't screwing with my custom created artworks. That would be totally uncalled for.
No checking on a jpg file it remains at its original shape and size.
I have been watching this indexing of the music by the Samsung Music app, very closely.
It returned both positive quantities and negatives so far.
I consider this to be one of the best sets of native apps of any phone so far, but the music app being the only AOD enablable app for lockscreen music has me baffled and disappointed. Though not entirely.
On one hand it is really blows it in that it has taken over 6 hours so far and only 3 of 8 of my newly added folders have been loaded.
Additionally it misses the ball on SEVERAL of the artwork configurations which VLC (not supported in AOD) picks up easily.
First the pro column, it looks good in album view and scrolls real smooth, without using 7 GB for APP Data (which is what vlc takes to run my music collection) (where is it storing the data? is my question here); refer to screenshots 1, 3 &4 &8.
However, there is a small number of album arts missing, and more than expected albums in the 'Unknown Album' position of the 'U's in the alphabet. Which indicates to me that there could be some id tag misrecognition or unrecognition someplaces;
refer to screenshot 15 &16.
Finally the Samsung native music app sees the artwork as different in albums where different songs have different artworks, but only in instances where those arts and songs are nested in separate folders. Such as my version of the Pulp Fiction soundtrack.
In cases where the artworks were embedded separately in the songs of a compilation to show their original album arts, which is how I did the Word Of Mouth compilation, (which I also screenshotted here from the Samsung file manager which displays that in the file manager we can see the individually embedded songs embedded arts in its little file manager thumbnail) there is no individually embedded artwork recognition in the AOD enabled samsung music app. The lockscreen displays show that VLC will have these Word Of Mouth albun arts as different.
Seen in the remaining screenshots:
It's not the only AOD enabled music app. Good play music works just fine as do others.
James.Miller said:
It's not the only AOD enabled music app. Good play music works just fine as do others.
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Click to collapse
I am of course speaking of the following always on display as seen in the following screenshot
(though I haven't tried those other apps) ...and not the screenshots in my prior post which are lockscreen shots.
Meanwhile after a decharge today from 100% down to now 44%, it has still not indexed my music files completely as at least one folder is still not seen atop the latest folders list. Most of them just showed up in the last hour or two though. About 24 hours so far since it started.
Presumably it must be storing all these artworks in the system, they are all there as I scroll the lists.
As my sd isn't formatted to the phone but only external.
Man, just buy a better sd card and dont blame the phone for this or atleast try to format this one and try again.
Man. Maaaaan haha. Don't tell people what to do. Aggression indicated stupidity thats just stupid you know. Literally. Loser. I bet you don't even keep any music on your phone. Probably using Spotify. Not me I'm from a different generation. We used to buy physical copies of our music albums, and carry them around with us. The music then was better too.
The phone must be using some sort of sdcard block by block scan eh. It still finding items on the thing. Not exactly a normal method to find files. I'm guessing it locates the head folder, but in my case it's a complex tree.
So if it is the sdcard being 500 GB card. That's a pretty good sized card anyway.
But it is still finding stuff screenshotted it then left it over night (after charge and restart) and it added some 10 more albums or so to the list.
It's not about size of card, but read/write speed, the slower the card the longer it takes for the phone to update the album arts.
I have no problem with this app. I have 6 GB music files in my SD card and it loads all albums and album arts immediately when I open the app. My SD card is Samsung Evo+ 128GB.
Slowly now. Latest rate appears to be finding about 1/hr. Samsung card. Singly written. Couple months old. EVO.
Also it is really fast to load those arts once it finds the absolute block in the SD cards file system.. VLC has always been ultra slow at loading all the music. If one were to attempt to enter an artist heading in VLC or album heading, it could take minutes to resolve the artist or album.
This app has its negative points, but it also has its positive points. I am not here to criticize the app. I am here making a point to observe it. Really pleased with the Samsung apps as I said in the op. The keyboard and the file manager I especially like. The points where the music app slips in finding some arts are probably gonna be repairable by changing out the few non functional music files on a case by case basis.
Seriously fast app for loading the musics and arts. real time jump anywhere in the list by track or albun. Very pleased.
VLC vs Samsung data usage stat for 300 GB of music. this app is like a window to my SD card.
Samsung s native music app is trash honestly.
I would recommend a alternative like vinyl player or black player.
Not pleased again. Used Smart Switch to do a phone backup, took out the sd card, put back in, restored the backup, and now it is re-indexing the music again. So once again my latest added folders are not here. Once again can't listen to my newest adds like Madonna's GHV2 for example, if I wanted to (with the Samsung music app, at least). Which blows.
I thought once it built its music index it would store it in the permanent. now back to square 1.
I'm glad i don't mess around with this stuff any more. I uploaded all my music to Google Play Music and never looked back. Available anywhere, on any device with internet and i can always download music from Play Music if i really need to. I don't have any need to carry thousands of albums in my pocket.
James.Miller said:
I'm glad i don't mess around with this stuff any more. I uploaded all my music to Google Play Music and never looked back. Available anywhere, on any device with internet and i can always download music from Play Music if i really need to. I don't have any need to carry thousands of albums in my pocket.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's cool. is that a sharable playlist or what? I can't say as I've heard of that one how does it work? You pay a subscription fee or what?
I have purchased a few albuns off of Google play store but I don't like the feeling of staying connected to the internet. So I can't rely on the internet.
Really ridiculous this app is slowly reloading those folders again. This all started cause I heard from the Samsung store that they could replace my carrier version of the software with something from Samsung. Which they then failed to do. Not something I would do very often.
Massive deceleration curve for this indexing thing. Been screenshotting the progress over the past several hours. The window over thr albums holds it's viewpoint above the list. Say it was started in the 4th quarter of the Alphabet (by albun population) at album number 1200, after 400 albums are added it enters the third quarter by going through first the T's backwards from Tzolkin Date to T Rex.Then on into the S's rising towards the top but staying at a viewpoint of album #1200 in the list, which now would have over 1600
While the population happens over a graph of time on the x axis. The y axis charts the speed of albums added. The curve is hyperbolic deceleration over time.
Last time the indexing was being completed, I saw a few albums still being added. (before the restart happened today).
Between 5 or 1 (guestimated but def. odd numbered amount) entries appeared sometime after noon today as shown in the following two screenshots. Seen by the shift of the Title on the upper left into the right column. This happened around 60 hours after the start of indexing Tuesday evening.
I think send feedback to developer of app and till they fix the problem try another app , i use Poweramp for years for all my music needs
Hi all,
I've been using my Galaxy Note 10+ 5G model shooting 4K HDR10+ videos and using the Gallery app to share them (or use the Instagram button to upload) and it converts it (though it says it is "compressing video") to standard SDR (so that people won't see a washed our HDR video on their non-HDR screens). So far, it's been good and works fine.
However, today I hit upon a problem where I was waiting for a video to convert/compress and it got stuck, so I cancelled it and tried it again and now the video won't share to Instagram properly, it says the file is not supported. I tried sharing the same file onto my cloud and downloading it onto my PC from there and the video is corrupted, so from what I can see is the SDR converted video file outputted by the gallery/video player app got corrupted during conversion and is useless as a converted video, but the original HDR10+ video in gallery is still fine and I can watch it in the Gallery app, but I can't RE-convert it as the gallery/video player app thinks it is already converted and if I try to share it, it just shares it fine without trying to convert it (again, as it thinks it has already converted it).
I double checked the original video file by downloading it onto my PC and since my monitor is not a HDR monitor, the video plays all washed out, showing that the video is still indeed a HDR10+ file.
I think my main question then is: where are these converted SDR videos actually stored on the phone? If the gallery/video app is converting these video files to SDR to be shared, are they stored somewhere? Or is it some kind of look-up table applied to the video file by the Gallery/Video player app and then shared out (but the original is still untouched as a file)?
I even tried clearing my cache in all the apps to see if it will re-convert the video but nope, as far the app is concerned, the video has already been converted.
Try converting another vid. May be just that one is mistagged. Clear data too if clearing cache doesn't get it done and my favorite cure; try clearing the system cache.
blackhawk said:
Try converting another vid. May be just that one is mistagged. Clear data too if clearing cache doesn't get it done and my favorite cure; try clearing the system cache.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Other videos are fine, it was just that one video! I tried clearing cache, didn't work, so I'll try to clear data on the Gallery and video player app. If that doesn't work then I'll try clearing the system cache.
So no one knows where these converted files are stored or whether it is just some kind of lookup table applied to the file to convert to SDR? Surely if I am converting hundreds of videos, it should be taking up space on the phone's storage?!
Ah! I cleared the Gallery app's data (because clearing cache didn't work) and it reset the Gallery app and now I can convert that video file again and it works now! So the metadata or converted data is stored by the Gallery app somehow...
Paiong said:
Ah! I cleared the Gallery app's data (because clearing cache didn't work) and it reset the Gallery app and now I can convert that video file again and it works now! So the metadata or converted data is stored by the Gallery app somehow...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yah. I was fearing it was the maybe video's metadata that was screwed up...
I really don't know how people who don't play with their Androids get by.
It's unnerving how easily Androids sometimes seem to pick up bad habits out of the blue. A lot of bugware out there.
Usually it's a simple fix if you play with it for a bit.
I loathe the "techies" who always fall back on the hard reset option in a blink of an eye rather than actually trying to find the issue.
I've had a lot of trouble with photo gallery apps since migrating to the Note 10+, you're not alone.
I don't use Samsung's... the native one worked so much better on my stupid S4+.
Progress? MS style maybe... I had to replace many of the Samsung apps that use to work fine on the S4+ with 3rd party ones to get the functionality I needed.
One of Samsung's subtle failings.
blackhawk said:
Yah. I was fearing it was the maybe video's metadata that was screwed up...
I really don't know how people who don't play with their Androids get by.
It's unnerving how easily Androids sometimes seem to pick up bad habits out of the blue. A lot of bugware out there.
Usually it's a simple fix if you play with it for a bit.
I loathe the "techies" who always fall back on the hard reset option in a blink of an eye rather than actually trying to find the issue.
I've had a lot of trouble with photo gallery apps since migrating to the Note 10+, you're not alone.
I don't use Samsung's... the native one worked so much better on my stupid S4+.
Progress? MS style maybe... I had to replace many of the Samsung apps that use to work fine on the S4+ with 3rd party ones to get the functionality I needed.
One of Samsung's subtle failings.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I know what you mean! I'm always fiddling around with my phone's settings. This feature of converting HDR to SDR videos bugged me for a while as I never knew how exactly it did it (coming from a PC video editing world, files obviously need to be stored somewhere and outputted somewhere if they are being converted) so it seems like the converted files are somehow stored inside the Gallery app, which is a bit strange but it would explain why once a video has been converted, it never needs converting again if you share it more than once (unless you clear the data like I just did now!). But I've had this phone since August 2019 and this is the first time the conversion messed up somehow...
I never liked the default Samsung gallery apps before, this is the first time I actually use it because I actually find the Gallery app on the Note 10+ to be half decent as it integrates with the video player, the conversion etc... and also the pics and videos actually look kind of decent in this app vs past apps, but in the past, on my S3 and Note 4, I've always used QuickPic as my gallery app (until they got bought out and went downhill from there). The only thing I miss on this default Gallery app is when you're scrolling through a lot of images and videos, on other apps if you hold the scrolling sidebar and scroll, it will bring up the date of the file so you know how far back you are scrolling (sometimes I need to go back to last year or even further back depending on the folder of pics I'm looking at) but the Samsung Gallery app doesn't highlight the date so you just have to find the file without help...
I use DV Gallery a lot. No ads.
Like the options it has for files it shows and more importantly ones it doesn't. Scanner images aren't what I want to see in my photo browser.
My biggest issue is with imported pic folders I loss the picture order. It's maddening. I have thousands of images with no easy way to restore them in date taken sequential order.
My PC based Canon apps can probably do it, maybe... stupid Android!!!
blackhawk said:
I use DV Gallery a lot. No ads.
Like the options it has for files it shows and more importantly ones it doesn't. Scanner images aren't what I want to see in my photo browser.
My biggest issue is with imported pic folders I loss the picture order. It's maddening. I have thousands of images with no easy way to restore them in date taken sequential order.
My PC based Canon apps can probably do it, maybe... stupid Android!!!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ah yeah, frustrating! I know QuickPic used to be able to "fix" the date (although sometimes temporarily) and sort it in date taken sequential order. Doesn't the default Gallery app sort by date taken order? There's never one perfect app that covers all needs! I feel your pain.