Z30 Pro & UHD8000 Constantly Crashing & Rebooting

I have 2 players that have been working without problems until yesterday evening. I bring the UHD8000 online, it boots up and within a few seconds of the "Loading Posters Please Wait" the player hangs then crashes and reboots. It continues to do this constantly. I disconnected all devices, local and NAS, powered off the zidoo and reboot, still the same issue. I shut the player down and went to my Z30 Pro in a different room, exactly the same problem. I spent about 5 hrs trying to get the players to work which worked without issue just 2 days ago. I have a large gigabit wired network and always use static IP addresses. I reset my entire network and router but still the players crash. I tried wifi and still no difference. The last thing I tried was to completely turn off the network access to the players, they then booted without crashing. The moment I connect the internet the player/s crash. I have a large network and everything connected is working without any issue. I have over 40years working with computer systems and networking so I am confident that I do not have any problems with my network and internet. I tried again this morning but still the same crashing problems. I do suspect that this is a Zidoo online issue, any ideas ? At the moment I have 2 expensive Zidoo "BRICKS"

 

In that case, use Wireshark on the traffic and see if you can spot the offending activity. Clearly the boxes don't like "something". It could be that you have some malware on your local network where the initial attack vector works but the exploit crashes. Or it could be that the Zidoos phone home and keel over due to changes on the other end. Or any of a million other reasons. You'll need to collect evidence to get anywhere with this.

For what it's worth. I have a Z9X 8K, firmware 1.02.22, networked using GigE and no issues. Today or in the last few days.

 

I think a clue here is the "loading posters please wait" dialogue - you should never see that if your sources are correctly configured.

As @peteru says, sharking is the answer here - filter out the mdns calls and the usual noise and you'll see telemetry logs (nothing onerous if you decode it and SOP for chinese media boxes) from HT on startup - this may be the source of the problem if you're blocking domains like umeng.com but I'm not sure why because the box should be happy if you do.

 

Out of interest I just added a regex entry to deny umeng.com and all sub-domains into my pi-hole.

Opening HT I can see the requests being denied in the live log and this has no effect on the box. The box boots and HT opens fine.

 

Its looking like daterbase corruption, by no means the first time. I have a very large collection spread over 2 servers and local content. Whenever I boot up I see the"loading posters please wait" dialogue for quite a number of seconds so could you explain why I should never see this and "you should never see that if your sources are correctly configured." I have around 100 sources, is there a limit ?

 

I have 10 sources spread over 8 Samba servers, no local content. HT opens to a populated home page immediately. I don't know of any limit to the number of sources. But 100? Dunno.

What I mean is that the "loading posters.." dialogue should only appear if the sources are not immediately available to the box on starting HT. But yeah, 100 sources, that's unknown territory.

Things to check:

1. Make sure the Poster Folder is set to "Custom" and the location is local - default is fine:



2. I don't do this because I'd like to know if a source goes offline, but "Display poster for unconnected devices" might be advantageous:

 

To make life easier and to ensure titles are correctly scanned I will have a source for each letter of the alphabet, this apples to my 4k collection and also my HD collection so right away there is 56 sources just on one of my servers so for me 100+ is easy to reach but I really don't think that there is enough memory in the Zidoos to cope. At any given moment there will be a lot of sources that are not online so is this the reason why I have to wait ages for the posters to load ? If all sources were online would it then be instant with over 1000 items online ?

 

Yes I would expect so - I have 1452 videos in mine - when you open the home page you're seeing a small snapshot of posters. If you open a posterwall it's the same only a few more. And once a poster is displayed once it's cached locally so appears immediately. There'll be some latency of you scroll fast depending on the poster size, but they're still coming from the cache. Once a library is scraped I always advocate a slow scroll through once to cache the posters - just makes for a better experience ongoing.

And once scraped there should never be a need to refresh - but, as I say, with 100 sources - I have no idea - I've never come across anyone with that many before.

 

My original problem was almost certainly a corrupt database, I removed all sources relating to my large server and now working. I've added one source back from the large server giving me a total of 29 sources. At this time posters are loading faster but I do only have a fraction of sources connected. There is another problem that has been around a while and not sure when it started. If I am on the homepage in HT and then come out, hit HT to go back in, it immediately jumps back out to the startup page. If I then hit HT I see that the Poster Wall has crashed and the posters have to be reloaded. I'm on the Z30 Pro and it does this every time, from memory it does the same on the 8000 but not as bad.

 

I can only guess it's to do with the number of sources - I've had the occasional glitch with HT over the years, maybe an occasional crash, but day to day no problems, but as I've always said, database housekeeping is pretty abysmal and even though it looks like there are tools to clean up, they don't.

It's only recently I got to 10 sources. Up until then I only had 3 UHD sources but since they introduced Multi Device and I'm able to aggregate sources into one widget it means I can have a separate 4K, 2K, DVD and doco library in HT - I used to use Jellyfin to keep everything segregated. So 10 sources works without an issue.

 

Think I have solved the HT interface crash problem. It comes down to which theme I was using, in the "Main Interface Style" I always used the 2nd from left, changed to the 4th (Last) one and the crashing stopped. Tried changing back and it crashes again, changed back to new theme and all ok and posters loading better. Yes, the Multi Device option is a real PLUS and yes "database housekeeping is pretty abysmal and even though it looks like there are tools to clean up, they don't." Good progress but having to rescan 5000+ movies on my main server will take a good full day. One idea I have had is to do an export once all titles are scanned then change the setting to "Prefer Local Posters". If ever the content needs to be scanned again it should be much quicker.

 

Ok, that's odd - second from the left is the old default one, and that's the one I always use, but swapping and changing makes no difference. I could understand it crashing due to a corrupt asset on the page though.

As for scanning speed, it depends whether you have MediaInfo scanning on or not and what resolution the videos are. There is very little, if any, speed difference between local and online scanning (I use NFOs and local art) - the biggest resource hog is MediaInfo because it has to open every file, and the higher the resolution, the longer that takes. But of course you don't really want to do it without MediaInfo.

It takes less than 2s per title - from memory I think I clocked it around 1.4, 1.5s, but that still adds up. I think my library takes maybe 40 minutes.

 

I knew I'd posted about scraping speed somewhere:

https://forum.zidoo.tv/index.php?threads/ht5-v5-0-68-beta-version-updated.101357/page-23#post-266546

 

Actually the scraping speed is quite quick, it just feels slow. Now back to business, I continued to add 1 letter at a time for my HD Movie collection on my main server and then add this to a Multi Device to end up with 26 scanned folders on one device. It worked ok but a couple of times adding a folder to the Multi device it crashed, other times it failed to update the total until the box was rebooted.The more I add the more the system becomes unstable. One thing I noted was "Missing Titles", I carried out a check based on each letter's total titles by using the filter option, then looking at the total for each individual device letter, and finally looking at the totals for the Multi Device. I have uploaded the table for you to have a look at. I have no idea how long it will take to sort this out. Other more serious problems, If I shut down my main server the box becomes even more unstable with a large amount of unconnected titles and devices, total failure to load the posters resulting in a system crash or the need to do a reboot. Shutting down the main server also results in all the devices on my smaller server showing has "Expired" ,really annoying having to rescan and add the smb credentials again, why are these credentials being forgotten when a different server is no longer connected ? I also have an older NEO S and never had all these problems but the new boxes do offer more but at what cost. I have just noticed that after 2min 40s minutes all the drives showing as expired are now online and showing scanned. I only have about 40% of my content scanned in, TBH I don't expect these zidoo boxes to work once I have loaded everything. !!

 

Forgot to say in my last post is that the Poster wall works well now that I changed the theme. The initial time for posters to appear is about 25s with 3600 posters. After that almost instant. I have found my first of the 32 missing titles, a movie in 720p titled Adulthood from 2008. This movie only appears if I create a source in the widget section for "A". The movie does not appear anywhere else but if I go into "Movies" and do a search it shows up. There are no problems with the file, it matched and plays ok. Is there a solution to this kind of problem, I think I have a lot of missing titles ?

 

When you say missing titles, are they in Unmatched or just missing altogether?

When a movie is scraped it either gets scraped correctly, incorrectly, is unmatched, or is added as a second version (A, B C boxes) to an existing movie. I can't think of a mechanism where it would be missing completely.

 

No, it matched without problems. Like I say I created a device that only contains the "A" HD Movie section. When I view this section the movie is there and only there. If I view any other section, even looked in TV, there is no trace. If I go into Movies and search it shows up but nowhere to be seen when I scroll the posters. I even tried just adding that one title but still no sign of it other than the widget device. I expect this to be the same for all the other missing titles. I might just try doing a backup, deleting everything then just add the "A" section but that really won't tell us what's actually going on will it. To me there are clearly a number of bugs to be ironed out in the database.

 

What if you go into "ALL"? Is it there?

 

Mystery solved, I did look in "All" but could not see it. I have just coppied the movie across to my small server and up popped a collection "Kidulthood"so it was tucked in there way down under K so no chance of spotting it. The problem being (I believe) is that a collection is counted as just 1 poster so it is likely to screw up the total movie count which probably accounts for the missing titles.Another strange thing I have with the "Recently Added" banner, I have a movie that is always at the start "Papillon", I remember this happening with the NEO also, strange and I know it will never move. If you have any insight into the smb credential issue it would be most appreciated, its a pain of a problem.

 

Yes, the count at the top is the number of "posters", so a collection is counted as one "poster".

What's the SMB credential issue?