GameEx newbie has questions

[Owensct]

Hi all,

Iâ??m new to GameEx and found out about it on the X-Gaming website and from what I can see it looks like it might be the system Iâ??ve been searching for to bring my movies, pictures, music, radio and Mame together. Of course there is always the proverbial fly in the ointment, which in this case is Iâ??m sure is a problem between the keyboard and the chair

I have a couple of issues/questions and was hoping someone might be able to help with.

My current configuration is as follows:

I have an HTPC, (Dell Optiplex P4 2.4Ghz with 1 gig RAM, 512 video running Windows XP Pro SP3). This is connected to my network via a wireless 100 mb switch to Cat6 into a Cisco 24 port 10/100/1000 switch which in turn connects to a Buffalo Terastation 2TB NAS (in an upstairs office) with Gigabit Ethernet which is where all my media resides, (movies, music, pictures, MAME ROM etc).

On the Optiplex I have a drive (Y:) mapped to my media partition on the NAS and on this drive I have various folders y:\e-books, y:\movies etc and under those folder are subfolders, for example under movies I have a variety of different movies I have ripped from my DVDâ??s, plus a secondary folder called y:\movies\disney (Disney films) another called y:\movies\Atomic Test Footage etc. Also, under y:\music I have a variety of MP3's (singles) as well as each of my CDâ??s broken out into individual albums such as y:\music\aerosmith, y:\music\classical\bach etc.

The first question I have is when I configure GameEx and tell it that my movies are located under y:\movies, and music is under y:\music will it pick up the files in the subfolders automatically or do I have to do something to make it as I donâ??t think Iâ??m seeing all my files?

Secondly, after I installed GameEx using basic installation and started doing some testing I selected multimedia and then videos, this popped up my folder location y:\movies, which was highlighted so I hit enter. Then up pops my first level files in the y:\movies folder, at this point the system froze, when I tried to escape, up and down arrows, nothing, although the mouse cursor moved. After about 45 minutes a DVD cover popped up next to the documentary An Inconvenient Truthâ??s title, I then tried to access the system and it was still froze. After another hour I did a ctrl-alt-del, and brought up the task manager and it showed GameEx as not responding, which I then killed. I have tried this multiple time with the same result. Also, from what I could see a number of movies were not showing up.

Is there something special I need to do to get the system to respond in a timely manner when accessing files that are stored on a server/NAS? It seems like a great system, but when I click on movies I want to watch and movie now not two hours from now

Also, I have no trouble accessing my files directly with my movie player or WMP (ver 11)

Any help or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

TIA

Gordon

[Belinda]

Well i'm no expert but i can at least get you started.

It will pick up sub folder content.

Depending on what setting you have chosen my guess is that it was busy searching the internet for dvd/film covers and info, which can take a fair while first time, if you have a large collection. This is my guess as to why it "froze" and a DVD cover popped up after 45 minutes.

When I first ran the search online for the database for films it was busy for like 4-5 hours

I seem to remember reading that it can be a little flacky for big collections when they stored on network drives but i'm not sure of this.

Hope this helps in getting your problems sorted. GameEx can take awhile to get it working as you want but it's worth it in the end.

[bkenobi]

GameEx is building a database of all of your media (music, movies, roms, pictures, title screens, etc, etc, etc). If you have a lot of content and it's not local, then it will take a long time to build this database. I don't use GameEx for media in my cab, so I can't offer specific help there. However, you might want to upgrade your 100mb wireless router to something faster if you want to improve the performance a bit (during file copying). It probably won't help for streaming since you should still transfer faster than it's played.

I would suggest launching GameEx again and letting it go for several hours. If you are concerned that it's not doing anything, you can monitor the log.txt file to see if anything is getting written to it. After each completed step GameEx will write information to that file to help in debugging.

[Owensct]

Thanks for the suggestions/info.

I have a bit of an update. I fired up GameEx last night, went into multimedia -> videos and left it to run all night. When I got up this morning it had errored out and the log file was showing on screen. Unfortunately, I had to leave for work so I didn't get to do more than take a quick glance at it. Once I k now more I will post the contents of the logfile.

I am impressed with what I've seen so far as to what it is capable of, and plan to register it, but first I need to make sure it will work with my setup and can do the other things I am trying to do, most notably seamless streaming of Netflix on demand movies. I have seen general references that imply that this can be done, but at present I have to get the other issues sorted out first, learn to walk before I try to run.

Cheers,

Gordon

[Tom Speirs]

Couple of things to add.

1 .net applications dont always work well with mapped drives for security reasons. You should use UNC paths instead. ie \\nasbox\drive\music

2. The freezing of videos is probably due to the codecs you have installed. Uninstall what you have and install the latest FFDSHOW or vista codec pack.

Cheers.

[Owensct]

Thanks for all your recommendations

Thanks for the info. Based on your suggestion I setup UNC pathing to my music and movies locations. This worked somewhat, but it still wasnâ??t picking up all my songs. I in order to get it to pickup all my music I had to change the Jukebox mode to file audio tags.

UNC pathing does not seem to work with MAME ROMS.

Now that I can see all my music Iâ??ve encountered another issue that I hoping someone can explain. The Album art stays the same for various artists or shows the wrong art. For example: I go into jukebox, select sort by artist/album and then select album a tribute to Glenn Miller and select that then select the song to If I select the song Swinging at the Ritz it shows the album art for Smash Mouth All Star Smash Hits. Any ideas as to what might be causing this?

Another question regarding Bluetooth. I have WMP setup with stereo Bluetooth headphones so I can listen/watch in privacy if its late without disturbing anyone. With WMP I can pause, switch tracks etc, using the controls on the headphones is there a way to get GameEx to recognize the BT headphone controls?

My movies are in a variety of formats MP4, 3GP, for use on my wifeâ??s IPOD an on my PDA, if I try to run these with GameEx I get a DirectX error, (I do have the latest version of DirectX and video drivers for my NVIDIA card) see attached logs, (GameEx and Direct X diags). If I try to run them from within WMP is just tells me it cannot play that format.

What video formats can GameEx support? Is there a way to get GameEx to not display formats it wonâ??t support? Is there a way to play these other formats through GameEx?

One of the reasons I am wanting to implement a front end is so it will be simplify things for my wife, if she tries to run an invalid format type and it crashes on her, she will grow frustrated with it and not use it.

When I tell GameEx to update the game list after I made some changes it takes hours and hours and frequently hangs. It will get to 55% and then stay there for hours. Is this normal or might it have something to do with the fact that my ROMS reside on a network drive?

What purpose does the resolution control serve in GameEx as I have already set my resolution for my TV display (PC to HDMI) through the NVIDIA control panel?

One last thing can anyone tell me the approach to take so I can access my Netflix instant play through GameEx?

Guess thatâ??s it for now, this is a really awesome tool and with a little more understanding and tweaking on my part I think this is going to be exactly what I have been searching for. Great job Tom.

Iâ??ll be registering it soon.

Cheers,

Gordon

log.txt

DxDiag.txt