New owner, concerns and questions

[oconnellc]

I have had my system for a couple months now and have a few concerns that my installer has been no help with. First, playing my music... I have a HC300 with a 8 channel amp and the 4" touchscreen. When I access my music library (total of about 10,000 songs) by genre via the touchscreen, the system is so slow to respond that it is essentially unusable. However, when I access by artist, it is still a little slower than I would like, but it is usable. I was first only accessing by genre, so when I talked to the dealer/installer, they told me that I needed to upgrade to the HC1000 (about another $3k). I played around with power cycling everything and things would speed up for a short period of time, but then performance would degrade. Again, talked with the dealer/installer and I was told "Yeah, that will happen. You should upgrade." Then, I figured out that accessing by artist works so much better. Again, talked with the dealer/installer and I was told "Huh. Thats weird. You should upgrade." I don't mean to come here and bash the product, but this sure seems like buggy software to me. Gradually degrading performance is a classic symptom of memory leaks. And the fact that system response would be so different when filtering by artist vs. filtering by genre also seems like some code is doing a lot of extra loops (or something. I'm a computer programmer myself). Anyone else have this problem? My music is on a NAS running linux and I have a gigabit network.

Next, I'm curious about integration of media (video) players. How does this work? And more specifically, how does the UI work? If I have something like a Popcorn Hour, will this just show up as a video source and when I select it, the system will just show me the UI from my PH, just like it currently shows me the UI from my DVD player?

When I open up the Composer and look at my Network Storage, there are two items, one for Audio Media and another for Video Media. What is that Video Media area for? Will the HC300 play some video files? No one from my installer/dealer seems to know the answer to this (actually, finding someone who knows anything about the system in general is pretty tough) and they are actually just terrible about getting back to me. If there is anyone from the Chicago area who is not Best Buy who knows anything about this stuff, I would really appreciate anything you could tell me about my system, how it operates, how it would operate with other audio/video devices, etc.

Thanks, Chris

[jberger]

10,000 is a LOT of files for the system to keep track of, hence the recommendation of moving to a much faster director in the HC1000. It's amazing the speed increase you can see from an HC1000.

C4 showed a media point device at Cedia which will add additional media outputs to the system. I'd expect that DLNA will be included in the product and DLNA will reduce a lot of the overhead associated with content management. Personally, I would not have recommended C4 as a media management solution for 10,000 files. I have thousands of CD's myself and it's just not a great solution for huge libraries today.

They just added FLAC support in the 1.8 release and I'd expect the next release will offer a much more compelling media management system as DLNA is now a workable, reliable standard for media.

With a device like the EVA9150, you can integrate digital media files (.iso's ect) into the C4 system and present them through the standard C4 interface.

[Rsmolo]

if you only have one hc300 and its running everything, navigator, director, zigbee it will be slow too manage your media. Upgrade would be recommended. As far as I remember HC1000 has 4 time faster processor plus it is not running navigator.I guess less expensive option would be add second HC300, and split functions. I noticed that with rhapsody people use less and less of their own media since they have access to everything they want (exception is some international music, Polish, Indian etc.)

Hc300 is not able to play video files, C4 will be selling media player and I would wait until its available. Netgear Eva9150 is a nice solution but there is couple of problems with it. You can search forum to see.

Popcorn hour also could be installed, the great Alan Chow wrote diver for it and it's available.I have never installed it so I can't say how it works. Personally I am using XBMC and again Alan Chow's driver to menage media and see cover art and all info on c4.

As far as dealers in Chicago I can't recommend one since I work for one and I don't want to use this site as advertisement.Go to control4.com and click on "where to buy".

[thecodeman]

No, I would not recommend Popcorn hour at this time. There was a two way driver, but to get it to work you had to "hack" it and use Telnet, and this would break the PCH gui. Very messy and the project was abandoned. For two-way integration of video media, your choices now are Zatabit, the Netgear 9150, or XBMC. There were some newer "media server" type equipement announced at CEDIA but I haven't had a chance to check them out.

As far as speed is concerned, in a project with multiple controllers really does help. Think of it as a computer system. Would you rather manage streaming media, pictures, house control, and HD on-screen navigation through a system on a chip (think phone processor - kind of) or rather a Core 2 Duo Intel processor with 2GB of RAM? Especially if you are buying today, the software is more powerful (zigbee pro) and with 2.0 you'll be able to do many more things.

Food for thought, how fast are your hard drives on your NAS? The read speed is almost always a limiting factor ( Here's a good primer - even though you have GB network, why does it still seem slow? - http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gigabit-ethernet-bandwidth,2321.html ).

You can also save by having an HC300 running nothing other than Director, which will be better than director running on a controller along with everything else as has been said. But it wont be nearly as nice as the 1000 and then thats ~$600 you could have put towards it.

[oconnellc]

To all, thanks for the answers. My one question about speed is that there is a huge difference in system performance based on how I access my library. 'By Genre' is unusable. 'By Artist', while not super fast, is usable and overall, I am content with my system. So, how could there be such a huge difference? Also, the gradual decrease over time just seems like a huge indicator of poor software. Spending $3k on improved hardware to support that just doesn't seem like the way for me to go right now...

'thecodeman', while doing tests on my NAS, I'm getting disk read speeds of ~80MB/s, so I don't think that is the issue. I don't have any issues streaming video from the NAS, so I'm pretty sure that my network or NAS is not the issue. For some reason, the issue seems to be 'Browse by Genre'....

Regarding 'Video Media', it seems that the answer is that this is just there for future expansion and I shouldn't worry about it now. Does that seem like I am interpreting the answers correctly?

'jberger', you mention that they just added flac support to the 1.8 release. How do I get this? Will I have more performance issues with flac as the file sizes are much larger? I am currently maintaining two copies of my library (one in flac that I use for my squeezebox in my main listening area and another mp3 version that I am manually keeping in synch so I can have music in the kitchen/deck/etc. via the C4). I would love to scrap all the mp3's.

'RSMOLO', you mention using xbmc. I'm very familiar with this, but I'm not sure how this integrates with the C4. When I add something like this, does this just become another device I select from the interface which will then just show me the interface of the device itself? That is, will C4 somehow try to integrate with the xbox (I assume you arent using xbmc on an htpc), or will it just show me the interface of the xbmc UI and I will be using that to manage my video library? Also, I'd love to hear who you work for...

Thanks in advance to anyone with the time to reply.

Chris

[Rsmolo]

xbmc is installed on pc, appletv or original xbox, and c4 is able to scan media from those devices and show them onscreen.Driver is an ip driver and in connections you type in device ip and that is how c4 communicates with device. when you select for ex. movie form onscreen c4 will search for it and switch to that video source and start playing.

[jberger]

When you upgrade to the 1.8 release of software, it adds FLAC support.

Yes, FLAC does take more CPU than MP3 so it can impact performance and responsiveness during playback.

The HC200/300/500 all have VERY limited CPU and RAM, hence the performance issues. The HC1000 is a much faster PC based solution with more RAM, DISK, etc. so it really adds a LOT of responsiveness to a system.

We have very similar approaches to media management. I rip everything to FLAC, then downconvert those same files to MP3 for iPod/C4 use. Getting rip of MP3 isn't a goal for me since I still want to use those on an iPod, but I'd much rather listed to FLAC in the house. I have not even attempted to put all of my music into C4, so I'm just using it for Rhapsody today. I just don't think the system could handle the load, given the hardware constraints.

Just about any NAS should be able to stream MP3/FLAC without issue, it's the controller that is the bottleneck. Given the maturation of DLNA and it's inclusion in consumer electronics (it was everywhere at Cedia Expo this year), I'd expect to see DLNA become part of C4 in the near future. The media point would be a great tool in a DLNA media world, so that's where I expect it will appear first.

With DLNA, the controller doesn't have to scan all of the files, index, tag, etc. It just requests an index and parses it for the GUI. Much less load on the controller and it easily scales to support large libraries.

[henniae]

Regarding 'Video Media', it seems that the answer is that this is just there for future expansion and I shouldn't worry about it now. Does that seem like I am interpreting the answers correctly?

The "Video Media" is for storing video. C4 has announced a Media Player that can play many different formats of video. The C4 Media Player will access the video that you store in the "Video Media". For example you can rip your DVDs and store them on your NAS and play them back with the C4 Media Player. The C4 Media Player was announced some time ago and is in the final stages of beta testing right now.

[thecodeman]

'jberger', you mention that they just added flac support to the 1.8 release. How do I get this? Will I have more performance issues with flac as the file sizes are much larger? I am currently maintaining two copies of my library (one in flac that I use for my squeezebox in my main listening area and another mp3 version that I am manually keeping in synch so I can have music in the kitchen/deck/etc. via the C4). I would love to scrap all the mp3's.

Only upgrade to 1.8 if you need to. Because of Zigbee Pro's AES encryption, your list navigation devices (like the SR250's menu tree) can be slower. This upgrade, and upcoming 2.0, really benefit from having an HC1000. Please see the 1.8 thread for more details.

http://c4forums.com/viewtopic.php?id=3949

[oconnellc]

I want to say thanks to everyone who replied. I do appreciate the time you took to respond. However, my question, I think, is boiling down to this: If my system can access my music when I access it 'by artist', but not when I access it 'by genre', then I don't think that is a hardware problem. It is a software problem. My installer is no help. So, is there any way to get in touch with C4 directly to find out if they have a way to address this?

Also, for the video player, people have mentioned XBMC. Is this good on any platform? Like, what if I install XBMC on my mac mini? It seems that the driver is IP based, so this could easily work on XBMC on an XBOX but not on any other platform. Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,

Chris

[thecodeman]

Also, for the video player, people have mentioned XBMC. Is this good on any platform? Like, what if I install XBMC on my mac mini? It seems that the driver is IP based, so this could easily work on XBMC on an XBOX but not on any other platform. Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,

Chris

XBMC is XBMC, regardless of platform. The hardware is what limits the video output options. The driver works with XBMC itself, and not the platform. I use XBMC on my PC, others an XBOX, Mac, or AppleTV.

[stenkb]

oconnellc - i would guess no response to your question about artist or genre = nobody really know why forsure...... for me my mp3s play fine - however everytime i start a new song or playlist the whole system basically lags - or freezes for about 30 seconds then its good again. sound familiar?

[oconnellc]

Kind of... If I'm viewing by genre, it takes a few seconds to view the artists, but then if I click an artist, it might take a minute to show the albums for that artist. Or, it might take so long that the touchscreen 'times out' and goes blank and I have to hit it again to wake it up. At one point, my installer said "Well, your system is doing so many other things that adding the overhead of your media library is just too much for it". Which makes me ask "What else would my system be doing?". And why would those other things somehow be given precedence over user input? No, no matter how crummy the hardware is, it should be more than powerful enough to control my media library. There are phones and cheap mp3 players that can do it. I think C4 just has some crummy software. Which is too bad, because the system is pretty cool. C4 just needs to get their stuff straight and stop telling people to needlessly upgrade to hardware they don't need and instead get their software working a little more efficiently.

[henniae]

Do you have the same lag when you view by genre or artist on the OSD on your TV?

One thing you can do is have the audio client disabled on the touch screen. If you are not using the audio out on the TS you can gain a few CPU cycles by having the audio client disabled.

What software version are you running?

Is the TS wired or wireless?

While you are waiting for the list by artist to load what happens if you spin the encoder knob?

[stenkb]

KICK IT!!!! if my touchscreen was a bit lower and i was a bit taller - I would kick the thing - that 30 second lag is crap! haha - i never had lag on my commodre64 so i don't get why control4 has to lag........

[thecodeman]

KICK IT!!!! if my touchscreen was a bit lower and i was a bit taller - I would kick the thing - that 30 second lag is crap! haha - i never had lag on my commodre64 so i don't get why control4 has to lag........

Your commodore64 probably wasn't doing as much.

[oconnellc]

thecodeman, I am being serious here, what exactly is the system doing? If there is no user input, I don't know why my system would be busy with something. This thing could be checking input queues for user events every 750 or 800 milliseconds and have the computer equivalent of eons to do nothing. Once I select 'Genre -> Rock -> Led Zeppelin', what is it doing, other than displaying the album cover and the names of the albums. Once I hit play, what is it doing then? I'm not trying to be a jerk, but I have heard so many times that my system is 'doing so much' and that is why I need to upgrade the hardware. What more is it doing when I hit 'Genre -> Rock -> Led Zeppelin' that it isn't doing when I hit 'Artist -> Led Zeppelin'. The fact that the system CAN do a lot, doesn't mean that it should be doing a lot when it should be executing user input. My nephew has a hand-held video game that does 10 times more than my C4 system ever appears to be doing, for half the price. These guys just don't write very good software. Good software can hide weakness in hardware. It doesn't really work the other way around.

[oconnellc]

Do you have the same lag when you view by genre or artist on the OSD on your TV?

Yes. It is actually worse. I just did a test:

A) My Library -> Led Zeppelin -> IV -> song list

My Library -> Rock -> Led Zeppelin -> IV -> song list

The times were

A) 8 seconds, 9 seconds, 8 seconds

2 min 15 s, 5 min 7 sec, 1 min 45 sec

I don't believe the difference between A and B is hardware related.

One thing you can do is have the audio client disabled on the touch screen. If you are not using the audio out on the TS you can gain a few CPU cycles by having the audio client disabled.

That sounds like good advice. Is that something that I can do? Or do I have to have my installer do that?

What software version are you running?

1.7.3.20

Is the TS wired or wireless?

Wired

While you are waiting for the list by artist to load what happens if you spin the encoder knob?

Nothing

Thanks for any tips you can provide. I'm already thinking about trying to get someone who can turn off the audio client on the touchscreen. Anyone here work for an installer? I'm assuming that you don't need to actually come to my house. Best Buy was able to do some work remotely and I really don't want to have to give them another nickel if I can avoid it...

[tigrzeye]

Not sure if this is relevant information in your particular case, but there is a maintenance revision out to 1.7.3 software.

One of the things it addresses is:

"Changes to the Navigator interface in Rhapsody, Artist searches not to retrieve genre information - This change improves search performance"

Of course that is concerning Rhapsody. But when displaying your "My Library" files that are on a hard drive or thumb drive connected to a controller, or in the case of the HC500 resident on the internal hard drive, does it have to go out to the internet to display/find the genre for each album/artist etc? Could that be the cause of the lag??

[ILoveC4]

It is easy to disable the audio client remotely, but I don't think you can do it as an end user.

Those load times are insanely slow. I am not going to pretend to understand everythign Control4 is doing at any given time, but I would consider those load times to be unacceptable. Fact of the matter is with a media library as big as your, getting more computing power (IE: HC-1000) would certainly make sense to me.

[oconnellc]

It is easy to disable the audio client remotely, but I don't think you can do it as an end user.

Those load times are insanely slow. I am not going to pretend to understand everythign Control4 is doing at any given time, but I would consider those load times to be unacceptable. Fact of the matter is with a media library as big as your, getting more computing power (IE: HC-1000) would certainly make sense to me.

Thanks for the note. To be honest, I'm not really sure that more hardware would help things. For example, I'm assuming that C4 is building an internal map of my music library (that is why you have to scan music). Then, if you open up the Directory (I think it is the Director), you can see all of your media with all the meta-data (genre, artist, art, etc.). If that stuff is loaded in memory, then I can't imagine what the problem would be. If the system needs to scan my media to build the library and then still access all the files/directories just to display a list, then something is seriously wrong.... Accessing memory is something that computers do REALLY FAST (ok, I'll concede that modern memory is much faster than it was just a couple years ago. But on the scale of a person standing, staring at a non-responsive screen, there is no difference. Memory is fast). I'm a computer programmer, so I have some experience with this stuff. I'm just not buying that I need a quad processor to access what is probably a couple megabytes worth of strings...

I like my system, so I'm not going to return it. But really, if I just described this scenario to you, without this being a Control4 forum, instead of saying I just need more hardware, you would probably be telling me that I need to just return my system and look somewhere else, not pour more money into it.

Thanks for the info on the audio client. I'll try again with Best Buy and see if I can get anyone to return my calls and try disabling the audio client. If I'm able to get it disabled, I'll report back if that has any impact. Might be useful information for others as well...

[oconnellc]

But when displaying your "My Library" files that are on a hard drive or thumb drive connected to a controller, or in the case of the HC500 resident on the internal hard drive, does it have to go out to the internet to display/find the genre for each album/artist etc? Could that be the cause of the lag??

I don't think so. When I have the system scan my library, it grabs all that meta-data at that time, so it already has that information in its hands when I'm trying to access my library. At least, I would think it would do that.

[wappinghigh]

Hi oconnellc...

Basically IMHO I think you have really been let down in the planning stages and set up recommendations by your installer. If music distribution was a big part of your brief, I'd be really pissed if this was me...

How many music zones do you have? Basically is it too late to

a/ send back the HC300 and make him trade you up to the more powerful HC1000? or take some pressure of your cpu by adding another multiroom audio platform eg:

b/ put in some apple tv's or airports, and use itunes and use the soon to be released C4 2 way itunes driver rumoured (unconfirmed) to be also coming from these guys: see www.autonomichome.com or

c/ add (an even better) multiroom specialized audio distribution system ...and wait for the codeman to write and sell us both a driver...

...seriously you must love your music! And adding to your collection. I find NAS's a right pain in the X%44#$%. With such a big library, do yourself a favour and make life easier for yourself by leaving the tracks as they are on a dedicated mac mini or imac (don't down rip them to mp3!!) It's so much easier to manage your library with itunes.

So use itunes as your music file manger and consider adding a better more music orientated integrated audio platform....by all means back up onto a NAS, but don't use it as your main storage. Have you considered that this might be your problem? If you must, then get a good/reliable FAST one!

Then take a look at either 1/ multiple apple itunes zones, 2/ sonos, 3/ squeezbox, (and if you can afford it and want the quality) 4/ something like Linn...I'm pretty sure all these handle libraries in the multiple's of 10's of thousands. I know Sonos handles up to 65,000 files...If you left all your channels on, you could still use your C4 8 zone amp with these products...or alternatively use an autosensing preamp/switch....

I'm not suggesting you ditch C4. Just try adding a different approach to your music library and distribution. I'd go with one of the first 3 (personally I'm a huge fan of no.2) and hopefully whilst you are experimenting, integration of these into C4 is not too far away.

Anyway, this approach works for me.

[bebster]

I use iTunes to manage my music mp3's.

I've setup my NAS drive as M: (M for Music) on the PC, and told iTunes to find it's music on drive M. That way I have the ease of iTunes and the benefits of NAS. That means everyone in the house can access the music library by pointing their iTunes to the the M: drive.

[cfgenie]

After reading through this thread, I am so frustrated for OCONNELLC. Why is nobody addressing his main question?!? The point he is making over and over and over again is:

It takes <30s to play a song when searching by ARTIST.

It takes >9m to play a song when searching by GENRE.

ILOVEC4, THECODEMAN, JBERGER, RSMOLO > You're all right...if he upgrades to the HC1000, his speeds probably will increase.

BUT do you guys as dealers consider the consequences of a customer spending thousands of dollars unneccesarily?

Even if *everything* doubled in speeds:

<15 SECONDS to play a song when searching by ARTIST.

>4 MINUTES to play a song when searching by GENRE.

Therefore a new HC1000 will not solve this problem. 4 MINUTES is still an unacceptable amount of time to wait when searching by GENRE.

WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE (Artist/Genre)? They should be almost the same! Has anyone else tried this on their own system?

I just did and I don't have any difference in load times for artists versus genres. I have a library with over 12,000 songs, probably close to 50 genres (since C4 doesn't combine "ROCK" "Rock" and "rock" as one genre), one HC300, one Audio Matrix, one B&K 8-zone Amp, one HC500 with the media loaded on the internal drive, a Buffalo 4TB NAS (not in use right now because we are trying to see if its faster to have the media on the HC500. When we had the media only on the NAS, the system was incredibly slow. Now using the HC500 its just really slow, not incredibly slow), one wireless + four wired touchscreens.

Maybe there is something setup wrong on his system? A problem with a driver, the bindings, cables, or media scanning? A corrupt database/library? As laborious as it sounds, maybe he should rebuild his library from scratch...?