HT4 Slow Poster Refresh Issue

I might try put together a dummy library of 5000 to see how bad it is...

 

Hello

Same problem and display latency encountered with a collection of more than 900 movies.
ZDMC does ten times on this point, which is a shame given its follow-up by the developers...

my two cents

 

Ok, I created a dummy library of 4000 movies - it's not easy, but I used ChapGPT to create scripts to collate and name all the files correctly which is an amazing piece of kit for procuring code!

So while a library of say 200 movies is not bad - not perfect, but not bad - once you get into the 1000's of movies, sadly I have to say that HT just becomes utterly unusable.

But on the other side of the coin, I've collected movies for decades and there are many many movies I will just never watch again, and I can still only procure a library from my collection of 1570 films, so god knows what some people must have lurking inside their rusty hard drives

This is the result on my previous scale:

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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 means 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.​

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So it seems to me that if you have 200-300 movies on your posterwall (as I do), performance is acceptable, but get over 500 and you get into trouble, and get over 1000 and it just doesn't work properly.

And bear in mind that this is after I've prepopulated all posters, which is a complete nightmare with 4000 movies.

If you don't do that then it's pretty much unusable for any number of posters and to be honest, you shouldn't have to do that.

Needs some work I think...​

 

My library is right around 1300 and growing. It’s been slow loading since I got it (Z9X) last year and this is with the library locally on it. On my Nas it was worse.

This item alone will prevent me from upgrading to this new generation of devices.

 

I started having the same problem with slow scrolling, must have exceeded 500 thumbnails.... Please fix this.

 

Some guys from AVS Forum confirm that they have the same issue. And with medium size option for the thumbnails, people mention that it starts with 500 posters on the poster wall to get a « Poor » result. Not too far from what I experience myself (627 posters now but the issue started for me months ago with less posters).

 

I think my results above are best case scenario because I completely reset HT before each test and remove all badges and background images so that all poster sizes have the same settings.

In reality, with people using a variety of settings, and as the database grows and things change, I think you're pretty spot on - the rot seems to set in at around 400-500 posters.

 

I'm glad this issue is surfacing. I've been struggling with it for years since the beginning of HT and I don't put all my movies in there.
This is one of the most obvious and annoying issues outside of other glitches that effect some but not all users.

 

I'm a bit surprised to see a brand new post about this because the performances shown on the first post are those I experienced since day one (2 years already) with my Z9X and it never improved, it's always been sluggish and slowly populating, and for me it's one of the old bugs they never fixed (caching issues ?). Users complain for a long time about the slow performance of the poster wall.

I have a library of around 900 posters, I use classic small view, with titles, ribbons (don't know the english word haha) and watched icon enabled. Pictures are supposedly stored on the local folder (last option of the list). My performances reflect the "poor" description (not the acceptable one, it's laggy after a few presses and posters take seconds to be all loaded once you reach new rows).

It's slow, and because there's no "fast travel" shortcut (like using digits to get to a percentage of the wall so by pressing 9 you get to the end of the list) it makes it even more annoying.

 

I think that to possibly find the problem, it would be to go back at least on a firmware of 12 to 15 months!!!
And see what happens....

 

Some good news - the devs will be taking this seriously

 

Also on our 'old' Z9X ??

 

This is an HT issue, not firmware, so I'm absolutely sure this will find its way to the Z9X etc.

I also don't think it'll be a quick fix - I think this needs a fundamental rethink on how the posters are populated and more importantly, how they are accessed in memory (I hope I'm wrong though...)

 

OK thank you...........hope it doesn't take too long!!

 

Thanks Markswift2003 for doing all that testing. Hopefully Zidoo will address this issue that has been affecting many of us for ages.

 

Yes, when I first tried HT4 on my Z1000 Pro, I found it unworkable with over 10,000 files and multiple NAS and HDD sources.
ZDMC has worked very well the whole time (on a daily basis) and does meet all my needs and expectations for smooth playback of new and quite old files (even some with codecs that Zidoo Player refuses to play).
I know a lot of others are using Plex and Jellyfin, for similar reasons.

Whilst I can see what the software developers have tried to achieve with the look of HT software, perhaps a full rethink and nice front-end (skin) for ZDMC/Kodi would be a simpler option for them?

 

This is a good news.

As long as they keep their word and they find a viable solution, for the new generation of players but also for the previous one, I can wait. I know that many of the customers now go through alternative solutions (Kodi, Plex, Jellyfin...), in part because of that.

Personally, I like the simplicity of use of HT4.0 and it meets, on the whole, my needs. We just need it to be smooth and fun to explore.

Make our HT4.0 great again.

 

Many thanks to Mark for all his efforts to document the issue.

 

To be fair, Jellyfin isn't really much better - even with small library like mine (about 400 movies), scrolling quickly is a jerky, horrible, unpopulated and blurry mess.

At least with my size of library, with the poster size I use, HT performs well.

 

Try this with over 16,000 movies... I have yet to find a single non-PC Kodi box that can handle it. My Ryzen 5 3600 6-core is the only Kodi box that can scroll top-to-bottom without any issues.

I am currently building a Ryzen 5700G with 128GB of RAM and I think that will be smooth as silk.