How long to fully scan a video library spanning thousands of titles?

The function is named « NFO Analysis » on the screenshot of Netmask (it could be another name, it depends if you use English US or UK).

 

Is is solved?

 

Negative. I disabled NFO analysis, deleted all sources, then started adding them one by one until around the fourth or fifth source, the bug came out. It seems perhaps it's hitting a threshold of around 1,000-ish titles, give or take a several hundred.

Definitely the one "Collections" folder with about 1,300 "hits" (or whatever Zidoo counts, which I don't believe is the actually total unique videos) it now never finishes scanning; it will always dump out to the Poster Wall when scanning it.

I'm at my wits end with this $1,200 machine; and I don't look forward having to go through the entire bug-reporting and wait-and-see if they ever fix it routine.

 

You can try it after turning off the ''parse media info'' in the settings.

 

Ok - I decided to put this to the test.

First I reset HT4 (on a test box!!).

I have 19 NAS drives, sizes varying from 4TB, 8TB to 16TB with movies, audio, backups etc and I segregate DVDs from BDs from 4K BDs. I usually only use the Zidoo for 4K since that's all I tend to watch in the cinema.

So on this test box I added 6 sources from 6 separate NAS drives like so:



In order, these drives hold 202, 207, 174, 260, 233 and 300 movies - a total of 1376 movies.

I scanned these with NFO set to Alternative since they don't have NFO files and I left Media Info scanning On. So basically everything at default.

I set them all running and of course they then scan one drive after the other with no user intervention.

This took 24 minutes to complete and there were 59 movies left "Unmatched"



These were mainly down to my naming, some seemed to be down to punctuation and some just spelled wrong. There were a few that I could see nothing wrong with the names, but I'm well versed with the vagaries of online scraping, so no biggie.

It took me a further 16 minutes to manually match these 59 titles.

This then left me with 5 wrongly matched titles from the original scan which took me about 2 minutes to rematch.

This then gave me 1052 titles in the movie poster page - obviously a lot of these movies are in collections and there are a few duplicates so they will show as different A B versions
under the one poster. But all 1376 titles are correctly matched and it took a total of about 45 minutes to complete from start to finish.



Other than resetting HT4, I did no preparation for this - didn't tidy any filenames up - these are all files that are accessed on other boxes around the house (a couple of Dunes and a Mede8er or two) - as I say, I keep the Zidoo for the good stuff.

So I can only think that your problems are somehow related to file structure, network topography or something we're just missing here - certainly in this test the box had absolutely no problem with the number of files.

Also there is a big mixture of MKV, DVD Vide0_ts structures, BD ISO and BDMV in there.

 

Did that earlier and no change.

 

Thanks for trying it out… I have similar mix of video files.

But I’ve added 2,386 “hits” combined successfully and it works fine.

It’s when I added that behemoth 3,195 sub-directory that it constantly chokes (FWIW, this folder contains only BDMV videos)

Or my Collections containing 1,336 hits, either by itself or added along with other sources, that also fails.

The library share topology on the NAS is as follows:

ROOT FOLDER:
Videos

SUB-FOLDERS:
AVCHD
BD ISO
DVD
Mixed Format
Collections
Documentary
Television
Blu-Ray Player
Extended->
->3D
->4K UHD
->Simple BD

Other than the nested folders contained in the sub-folder “Extended”, it’s relatively simple.

Of the above, it’s the AVCHD (3,195) and Collections (1,336) that I cannot scan.

I do have several hard sym-links defined on the NAS, for AVCHD and BD ISO videos with multiple movies, but to the Zidoo, they should be presented as separate paths, just like my YAMJ and my PCH C-200. So this should not be a cause.

Let me emphasize that: YAMJ scans this same NAS in its entirety with no issues. This suggests the topology is technically sound at least for YAMJ. But I don’t rule out maybe a deep sub-folder that is okay to YAMJ may cause Zidoo to choke.

BTW, how do you take a screenshot via Zidoo?

 

Press one of the color buttons of the remote and select the function for the screenshots. Now, every time you will press that button, it will take a screenshot.

The screenshots are saved in media center, storage, pictures, screenshots.

 

It could well be the symbolic links if they define absolute paths that make sense to the PC and therefore YAMJ but don't define valid paths for the Zidoo.

 

Well, my next troubleshooting step is to break up the AVCHD folder.

My NAS contains 25 drives with all folders spanning all drives. SO, I will rename the AVCHD folder on each drive with a number suffix indicating the drive it's on. E.g. on disk 1: AVCHD1; disk 2: AVCHD2.

I will add each numbered subfolder individually to see if any specific subfolder is problematic.

This will hopefully allow me to narrow down where any offending folder structure is located at...

 

I first changed the name of every single large sub-folder, and then as I started adding them to Zidoo, I realized that was just too much:

AVCHD1....AVHCD25
BD IDO1...BD ISO25
Collections1...Collections25

That's 75 individual Sources to add.

So I gave up on that idea and simply added whole drives: Disk1...Disk25. Each drive contains between 250-600 titles.

It's when I got the disk4 that I ran into the dreaded dump everytime.

I have to now start filtering out stuff on that drive to see if there is any specific titles that it chokes on.

This is very tedious and time consuming...

 

Latest Update: I decided to just bypass for now any drives that caused Zidoo to dump to the Main Wall screen and got up to about 12 drives, averaging about 260 "hits" per drive. Adding the 13th drive causes big problems:

The moment I add the 13th source, the screen dissolved to blurry screen and freezes. In time, it may dump to the Main Wall screen, but not always. The GUI does not respond to anything except a Power command. Powering it back on, it did not save the 13th source.

Everytime I attempt to add that 13th source, regardless of drive, it will freeze the GUI the moment I select "OK" to add the 13th source. I've already have about 3,500 "hits' successfully scanned by then.

The matter of this issue suggests a memory issue; hitting maximum allocation perhaps. Time to refer to Zidoo support...

 

This is just a gut feeling, but I don't think this is about memory allocation.

And I though I had a lot of NAS drives!! (I have 20 but only use 3 for video for the Zidoo...)

 

Support just told me to disable MediaInfo... But I don't know how to do that and am waiting for his response on how to do that.

 

It's on the "Preferences" page in HT4:

 

Using the last firmware, settings of HT, preference, parse media info —-> Off


Too slow…

 

Been upgrading the NAS with a bigger drive replacement so couldn’t try this out during the rebuild until now: added the biggest sub-folder AVCHD and it fully scanned all 3,207 hits, which is the first time ever. Subdued elation here as there’s a lot more sub-folders to get through, but I have tempered optimism afoot.

Now to start adding each sub-folder one at a time like before and see how far I get…

 

SUCCESS!

Er, almost.

Finished adding every single sub-folder... except my "Mixed Format" one because it almost immediately dumps to the Poster Wall. This contains mkv's, avi's, m2ts's, ts's, and everything else that is not a Blu-Ray/DVD ISO or BDMV (AVCHD) format.

I can live with this as these comprise just a tiny handful (147) of my video library. Most of these are some sort of HDTV recording as they typically have not yet been released in at least Blu-Ray quality but are better than DVD quality.

But finally I can view my library in its entirety via Poster Wall, and can begin to relegate my C200 to back-up duties instead of being my primary media player over the UHD-3000.

Now, about my big issues with 4K video quality, specifically fast motion visual artifacts (can't yet retire the Oppo UDP-203)...

 

Wow, you've had some journey there! Congrats on getting (most of) it sorted though.

I assume you've made a backup?? It also would be a good idea to export NFOs and artwork so you would have that info saved locally.

So this issue with fast motion visual artifacts - can you elaborate with an example or two - this isn't something I've seen.

 

The visually apalling motion artifacts was apparent in the 4K movie "1917" with Dolby Vision: near the beginning when the two protagonists are walking through the trenchline towards their line of departure, rifles slung, barrels up. The tip of the rifle barrels juxtaposed with the bright blue sky there were quite a few instances of large pixlated blocks between the tips and helmets. There was just so many artifacts happening constantly throughout that long trench walk scene which irrated me so much that I just stopped watching via the UHD3000. Instead, I switched to the Oppo UDP-203 and it played perfectly.

Another 4K movie, "The Greatest Showman" (HDR10), had a fast motion scene that briefly exhibited similar motion artifacts. But only that one time that I noticed.

I also noticed that generally, 4K movies on the UHD-3000 are overall darker than on the UDP-203. Haven't dug into the video settings to see if I can bump it up, but one movie, "21 Bridges" (HDR10) in the beginning night scene when the antagonists are prepping for the drug heist at their car, it was hard to discern details versus through the UDP-203.