HT4 Slow Poster Refresh Issue

For a long time I've received a lot of complaints about HT4 and its slow poster refresh.

I've always been very pleased with the poster wall on my boxes and the Z9X Pro is certainly no slouch.

For the most part I've not been able to replicate the issue and could never really figure out what was causing it. But I've recently been contacted a few times on PM about it and decided to take a bit of a deep dive.

My main library, the one I use day to day, contains 495 movies. Because of collections, this translates to only 288 posters on the Movie poster page. (I use Jellyfin for 2K as I rarely watch them)

I always use "Overspread" for the maximum number of posters on screen and I've never had slow poster refresh.

Recently I created a dummy library of 1571 movies for testing - this is basically all the DVDs I have, all the BluRays I have and all the UHD BluRays I have, but using small video files of less than 1MB so it's very portable.

Having reset, I loaded this into HT and then populated the movie wall fully once (which I always advocate).

Then I tried navigating around it.

And it's a mixed bag.

For Overspread, performance isn't bad, although not ideal - certainly not as good as my normal small library.

For all other poster sizes (Small, Medium or Large), I would say the poster wall is pretty much unusable - far too laggy and not smooth at all - sometimes taking several seconds for posters to populate - remember, I've already pre-populated before hand which is all I have to do with my "normal" smaller library.

I tried this large library on USB and NAS using both local art and online art and performance did not improve in either case.

I tried on a Z9X and a Z9X Pro and although the Pro performed better, it was still very slow at refreshing when you scroll fast.

Here's a couple of rough and ready videos:

1. My usual small library but on medium size - acceptable, but still not ideal since the posters still have to populate as you scroll:

https://streamable.com/pnc54k

2. The large library with posters set to Small - unacceptable performance:

https://streamable.com/8te5uz

(Both these are on a Z9X Pro)


Comments are most welcome.

 

Finally the problem is recognized, it has been slowing down for several firmwares now and lately it's getting worse and worse!!
Yesterday I switched to 'dispersion' mode (I took out the binoculars) and frankly there is a 'chouia' better but still blockages, returns to the first page, hard drives which are not recognized (you need them restart) etc..........
Quick, very quickly a firmware to correct all this !!!

PS: I admit to having a large quantity of files and dozens of hard drives on 2 NAS!

In detail: I have about 2800 films and 990 series!

 

I experience the same issue as you for months now, but on my RTD1619DR Zidoo players. I don't remember when it starts but I know that it's getting worse with time and now this is a problem I encounter daily. I think that it could be related to my collection's growing in time. Even if I don't have such a big collection on my wall as Mark (628 posters on my own posterwall, around 1320 videos total), this affects my user experience very badly.

I remember that some users here were also complaining about the same issue. On the biggest french forum about Audio and Video, where I am active daily to help other Zidoo owners, some of them has starting to talk about the same kind of problem with a posterwall not being "smooth" at all in time, witth thumbnails also disappearing for no reason. Sometimes it's right after oppening of the Pop Menu to edit a poster, sometimes for now reason. All of them find that the problem was getting worse over time but they thought that it was a bug appeared with a firmware update or something like that.

When talking with some of them in PM, I noticed that the configuration of each other was not similar. The only commonality I could see was that for all of us, our collection grews over time and the problem grews along with that.


To give you an example of what it looks like on my own poster wall, I took some screenshots of the issue:


The first rows of posters are displayed correctly, as usual. And this is what happened when I have used the fast scroll down on my "already populated" posterwall :


A first stop and some posters are missing :





As I know quite well the issue, I run to the bottom of the posterwall as I was sure that all the posters were gone now :





Waiting a moment, it started to populate once again :




I didn't take some screenshots of what follows after that, but if speed scroll up, with some stop here and there, the thumbnails will also start to disappear.


My configuration is quite simple : an internal HDD and a DAS from Qnap plugged in one of the USB 3.0 port of the Zidoo with 4 HDDs inside. All the HDDs are in individual mode, so separated from each other in Media Center. I don't use the NFO+ local images system, but the one by default. I have a Z10 Pro and a Z1000 Pro at home, and the issue is here on both of them. With the overspread mode (unusable on a 65" TV), it's not perfect but the issue is less visible (a small delay appearing to display the thumbnails vs the first time I force the cache to populate my collection). With all the other posters size, the issue is here, sometimes right away, sometimes later but you can be sure that the issue will come back and affects your user experience daily.

In my point of view, this issue is a major one, as it affects the user experience very badly when your collection starts to grow. HT4.0 is the heart of the Zidoo players and for now, it is affected. I really hope that Zidoo will be able to address this issue, of course on the new generation of players, but also on the previous one (even if it's a firmware update only containing a fix for that). As some other users, I was trying to live with that random issue at the beginning but now it happens every day and that ruins the pleasure that I have to navigate through my own collection of movies.

 

I would like to report another problem with the display of covers

Sometimes HT makes inexplicable cover changes on custom files.

In fact, when I have to make a personal video appear on the video wall, I have to assign it a card from a phony movie; then I change the cover and the background: but often the cover/background of the original movie takes precedence when I had saved the configuration


...and I also have very big slowdowns on the display of the covers.

Poster size : Middle
Library : +700 movies (Synology NAS)
Model: Z9x and Z2600

 

I have a library of 1100 films and over 900 posters.
Home theater has always been slow for me. I put the folder for the posters on the Z9x or Pro's internal hard drive, but that doesn't do anything. Home theater is still slow compared to Kodi or the Dune-HD media center.
My films are on connected USB hard drives. And I noticed that when scrolling through Home Theater 4, the USB hard drives are accessed to load the posters.
Why aren't the posters loading from the z9x or z9x pro's internal hard drive? How is it actually set?
Kodi and the Dune-HD media center can also display posters when my USB hard drives are not connected, but the Home Theater 4 cannot. Which supports my assumption that the posters are loaded from the USB hard drive.
Perhaps this decision was made to avoid overloading the z9x's small (16GB) internal hard drive with posters. My ZDMC installation on my Z9x Pro is now about 3200 MB in size,because of the thumbnails but scrolling through the library is lightning fast in contrast to Home Theater 4

 

In my settings, I use the personnalized option to store the images, so all of them are stored in the internal memory of my Zidoo, in the default location of this option (in the the hidden folder .HomeTheater including the settings of HT, in Storage). Previously, I used the storage of the images on all the peripherals but I wanted to see if that other option could addresse this issue. The answer is simple : no.

I think that is a cache issue. Sometimes I ask myself if real thumbnails, created from our posters and stored to the same place, could be more stable in time.

 

@ Mark,

On your first video, is it using the NFO+ local images or the default system? I don’t see thumbnails disappearing on it but it also hangs on my posterwall sometimes, even more than you.


On the second video, we can see a perfect illustration of the issue that I was talking about (using medium size in my case). In my case, dynamic background is desactivated.

 

I also use exactly the same options, but like I said, when I scroll, the USB drive is still accessed briefly. A few hundred are cached after a scroll or two through the library, but not all, and that's annoying.
I also think that real copies of the posters, stored on the internal z9x drive would be much better, if kodi or zdmc and dune-hd media-center did it that way, and they are much, much faster

 

Finally, this problem has been exposed...
Since the beginning and despite my low numbers of vidéo, I had noticed this problem, but it's been worse since firmware 0.60, to the point that at times it loses connection with USB HDDs and returns to the home page...which is also very slow to load compared with before.
I hope Zidoo will take this problem into account and respect its customers...
Sincerely

 

I found a thread from past february, where some of us were already talking about this problem.

http://forum.zidoo.tv/index.php?threads/z9x-sluggish.95295/

 

Don't get me wrong, home theater 4 is great software. I love how reliably it scrapes the movies. i love the design But when you have a huge library like me, it's very important to be able to scroll through your library quickly and smoothly, and unfortunately that's not the case with home theater 4

 

I've done a few more tests with various library sizes vs performance.

These are done on a Z9X Pro with online scraping, no background image on the posterwall and no names or badges on the posters - I don't think these necessarily affect scrolling performance, but I wanted to set a baseline across all sizes and smaller sizes don't incorporate all these features.

I also turned off the slip out info on "Overspread".

The results I got were as follows.

​

Excellent means there is no lag whatsoever.

Good means that you can scroll top to bottom on the posterwall with little or no lag - the posters more or less keep up with the scrolling and there is no "catchup" population after stopping at either the top or bottom.

Acceptable that you can scroll top to bottom on the posterwall with minimal lag - there maybe say half a screen of posters not populated when you reach the top or bottom but they catch up within milliseconds. There is no "catchup" population after stopping at either the top or bottom.

Poor means that whatever you do there is always a lot of lag after a few pages of scrolling and in a lot of instances there is a huge amount of "catchup" population which can takes several seconds. I would deem this as unacceptable and unusable.


You can see that you need very few posters before performance starts to become unacceptable.

 

I would point out that the display system is a problem, but it's not just that:
-opening of the first page often slow
-block on this page and return to main menu
- redoing an erroneous cover takes an infinite amount of time
etc........

 

I confirm on my Z9X. Images are not displayed quickly and the more we have files, the more it's slow.

 

I have the exact same problem since day one on my Z10 pro and I must say it’s pretty annoying. Scrolling through a large library is painfully slow. Coming from KODI, and having tested the Dune Real Vision 4K (both are smooth and fast) I must say that it’s one of the things that annoys me the most on the Zidoo.

 

I agree with VDDAN, even though we both made the points on another thread.

 

I have the same problem on the poster wall with my X10 (RTD1295)

 

I have about 4800 movies and scrolling is worse than poor…

 

This is why I completely gave up on HT4 and use the plextozidoo setup. Plex does this just fine. At this point, Plex / Kodi are the only options for people with bigger libraries

 

Even with only 600 posters on the posterwall + poster size on "Medium", I was already in the "Poor" spot.