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

Hooked up my new UHD3000 and got it pointed to my NAS, but it seems to only "find" about 200-300 titles at a time. I've got literally thousands collected over the nearly two decades, starting with scanning all my almost 1200 DVDs back in the day (had three daisy-chained Kenwood Sovereign DV-5900Ms), during the start of the Blu-Ray/HD DVD wars.

After several days, it's only found 746 total titles (movies and TV shows) and I'm absolutely frustrated at this point. I've tried leaving the machine on 24/7 but it doesn't budge in finding any new titles.

If I do not intervene, it doesn't appear to do anything after finding it's 200-300 titles during it's pass. It seems the only way to get it find any more is to cancel it's current scanning process, then sometime later it will again do a full scan, find another 200-300, then be done. Until the next time I manually cancel the scan process.

Is there any way to get it to do a 100% complete initial scan of the entire library at once?

At the rate this is going, it will take MONTHS of me manually intervening, which is completely unacceptable. I have better things to do than babysit this machine for hours and hours on end.

 

Do you use the exact titles coming from TMDb, including the release date? You have softwares to do that automatically from your PC (filebot, tinyMediaManager, TV Rename…).

Maybe try to optimize the paths of the sources, to point on different main folders (My TV Shows, My Movies, My old Movies, stuff like that).

With the last firmware, I find the complete scan of a source a bit slow vs with the previous firmwares. But that doesn’t take hours to scan over 700 hundred movies and around 20 TV shows in my case, even not one hour.

 

I came from a PCH world and all these thousands of videos are labeled correctly, e.g. "My Favorite Movie (1994)", and have been correctly matched with the IMDB/TMDB databases in the past.

Are you saying to add multiple sources, which each source pointing to sub-folders of my main video library folder?

When I first powered up the UHD3000, it immediately indicated an update was available, which I promply performed.

Again, the UHD3000 does eventually scan through it all, but only matches small percentage (I believe there are 7,400 titles it mached, according to the "746/7400" label on the scan screen). So it stops matching after a couple hundred or so, even though it seems to scan the entire 7400 titles. There are only 60ish "Unmatched" titles, most of which are TV shows divided into Seasons folders, which I'm removing.

UPDATE: after the last scan, it's now up to 1,041 "found" titles...

 

Usually, I remove all the sources found by default by the Zidoo, to point exactly to the main folders where my movies are on my DAS and the internal HDD of my Z10 Pro (Movies, Movies 2, Movies 3, Collections, TV Series). Doing that, you will be able to scan every main folder independently and all the results will be "merged" at the end in HT 4.0.

I think that the number of files in your collection could be one of the reasons for your pb : 7400 files that's huge! Create a folder with around 700 files inside, something like that and give it a try with the automatic scan pointing on it. If everything is ok (check the unmatched located in "other" at the bottom of your poster wall to match them manualy, the posters and stuff like that), go to the next main folder and so on.

PS: My english is not super good (I speak french) so I hope that everything is clear in my explanations.

 

I think this could the issue. I opened the "Sources" window and simply watched it scan through. It hit about 1573/2500ish when it stopped "matching" new titles, but kept on scanning. When it hit around 5000ish titles, it froze and returned to the main "poster wall" selection window. When I went into the "All" window, I saw a notice at the bottom that it found a source needing updating and it would start in 6,5.4...

I then went back to the Sources window and watched it scan from the beginning (0/0) and again at 1573 matches, it kept scanning... and again seemed to "crash out" and went back to the main Poster Wall selection window. I went back to "All" and again a message popped up below saying an new source needs updating...

All told, total found titles remained at 1,041.

So, there's definitely a bug with handling multi-thousands of titles in one source.

I will delete the original source and create multiple sources to individual folders within my video library...

 

What firmware version are you running? The issue you describe sounds like a problem that used to happen months ago - you used to have to have several passes at scanning before it would find everything.

Admittedly my library isn't anything like as big as yours, but it shouldn't behave as you describe.

With the latest firmware with MediaInfo scanning it takes on average 0.4s per title so your 1200 DVDs should take about 8 minutes.

 

6.3.40, which the system tells me, “I’m up to date”

So I deleted the original source and created one pointed to a sub-folder containing just over 3,000 videos and it found about 930/3000. I re matched about 70 and tried forcing an update scan where about 2000 titles in it dumped me back to the poster wall. I’m now assuming this is a “crash” due to a bug..

 

Why not to try a folder with less than 1000 files as I suggested earlier? I don’t know the limit allowed for a source but that would be a start.

It could be a bug as you say, but also a corrupted file somewhere in your collection. I remember a discussion about an issue like that and the pb came from a corrupted file. To find it, the guy added some files by batch and refreshed the scan everytime until it failed.

if you split your collection in 8 folders something like that and only one failed, that would be a good indication.

I’m still trying to imagine how it would look with 7400 posters displayed on the poster wall. lol

 

I gave it a shot. Picked a sub-folder that had just over 600 titles, and the Zidoo worked no problems. Subsequent scans netted zero issues. So far so good...

Added a second sub-folder, containing about 80ish titles and no sweat.

A third with only 80ish, no problem

And a fouth one almost 300 and it's cruising.

I decided to call it a day.

The next day (today), I added a fifth one, size unknown because ever since then, Zidoo dumps out to the poster wall when it starts scanning one of the earlier smaller ones.

Over and over again, every single time, it crashes out; it never gets the newly added fifth source.

This is a show-stopper bug, verified.

 

Did you already try to restore factory settings in Quick Settings + unplug the player a couple of minutes? It will erase everything.

 

I haven't thought of that since it's brand new out of the box. If I have to already resort to doing this, then this does not bode well for the future of this device.

I spent over $1200 USD for this but the past weekend I ended up watching movies on my 11-year old Popcorn Hour C-200; if I wanted a plain, archaic file view to launch movies from, I could have done that on my Oppo UDP-203. (sigh)

Well, I'm in it now so might as well slog away in getting these issues sorted out.

Where do I turn to report having issues, assuming they remain after I do the factory reset?

 

Well It happens sometimes after an update for some users. I can’t guarantee that it will solve your issue but you have nothing to lose trying this.

To contact Zidoo:

https://www.zidoo.tv/Contact/afterservice.html

What I don’t understand with your last try it’s why the zidoo scan again a folder already scanned, if you didn’t add new files in it. Normally, it will check quickly if nothing new when HT is launched and that’s it. In Preference, you leave « automatically scan devices » to off, right? Only automatic updating sources needs to be on, as it is by default. Check the permissions of your NAS too, just to be sure.

Then, 8 folders to get less than 1000 files each, just to be sure, and a scan one by one. If when you add one of them, the issue is back, remove the last source added and try another one.

After that, I don’t know what to suggest to you if it doesn’t work.

 

I have 3 shares located in my multimedia folder on the QNAP. NAS. They are movies, music and tv. Exactly the same as I had on my PCH - A500. Once I connected my 3000 and the initial setup done, after establishing my share locations HT went away and found every file, over a thousand in Movies and around 500 in TV. From memory 6 titles were unmatched. It took me awhile to get my head around the matching process

 

Unfortunately, it didn't resolve the issue. I started adding sub-folders in a different order, avoiding the one that seemed to cause it to crash, but after adding four of them, first one had about 1300 "hits" (I won't call them titles because the larger the number, the less "matches" it has so I'm not sure how it tallies the totals), then second 80ish, the third 300ish, the fourth about 600ish. It was the fourth one that started crashing out, which before I did the reset, was the first sub-folder I had added and worked fine.

I really thought this product was very mature and free of such devasting bugs, but boy was I wrong. Again this evening I used my C-200 to watch a movie since I don't have any real poster wall on the Zidoo.

Maybe it's NFO files, which are formatted for YAMJ. I don't know, but I can't believe this is happening with one of the most expensive media players on the market. I really don't look forward to trying to weed out all the possible NFO files that these sub-folders may contain, but it's the only straw to grab at at this point...

 

You still have the NFOs from YAMJ inside?!

That would have been helpfull to know that. lol

 

I only use NFO files if I'm grouping it into a collection, to provide an IMDB ID number if it's having a hard time matching it, to rename it differently (e.g. "My Greatest Movie (Bonus Disc) (1984)", or "...(3D)...", etc., to change genre/category (e.g. "Documentary" for bonus discs).

So there shouldn't be that many in the sub-folders I've selected, except the "Collections" sub-folder. But this is the very first sub-folder I added when I was told to refrain from selecting the top root folder with such a large library, and it worked just fine with all those NFO files (it wasn't until I added a fifth folder that first go around that the bug reared itself).

Anywho, since for the sub-folders I selected (other than the "Collections" folder), there shouldn't be many NFO files, meaning, it's going to take me a lot of time to hunt them down...

 

By default, the Zidoo will check the NFO files if it can't match a movie. There is an option about that in the preferences (HT Settings) with 3 choices. The last one will ignore the NFOs.

You should try it.

The NFO files created by Zidoo, if you activate the option to do that, are based on KODI.

 

For my collection of videos I moved out all my NFO and other files for backup if needed but for the most part all I have in my folders is the movie and a separate subtitle track. HT seems to have found everything it needs without having to use a NFO file. I have no idea if that's the cause of the problem but I decided to just keep it simple especially now HT use media info for technical details.

 

How do I get to this setting? There appears to be at least two places for settings, and I don't recall seeing anything regarding scanning and NFO file preferences...

 

Go to the home page of HT and then top right there is a wheel, open and you have more settings