Movies "disappear" suddently and have to be re-imported (1 Viewer)

[ofird]

I have MP 1.3 Alpha with Moving Pictures 1.3.1.1350.

From the upgrade to 1.3a the I suddenly lose movies from the db and they are back to the importer - which means I have to re-import them to make them show up again.

This is happening every now and then, I open MP and go to movies and all of the sudden I see much less movies then I had last time.

What do you think is the reason for this?

 

[RoChess]

Are you able to reproduce this behaviour? Because then you simply have to enable debug verbosity log mode inside MediaPortal log files and recreate the full behaviour of where you have the movies, and when they 'dissapear'. Then provide us with your movingpictures.log and movingpictures.old.log files, as they will contain exactly 'why' it is happening. If you have to restart MediaPortal more then once to recreate the problem then be sure to rename the movingpictures.log file each time to like movpic.step1.log so that they are not removed. Only the one before current is saved as movingpictures.old.log and you might need more then two to capture the behaviour.

Without log files it is just a guessing game. One obvious guess is that you have those specific movies on a NAS box and it like puts the drives to sleep, but keeps the UNC share active with no contents. At that point Moving-Pictures plugin thinks you have deleted all your movies and removes them from database. NAS comes fully back to life and MovPic re-adds the movies. It has full support for off-line media, but it has to be able to 'detect' in a correct way that the media/share/volume is totally gone from the system and not appear to be active, but "empty".

The log file would show all of this in great detail and even provide insight into a solution.

 

[ofird]

I assume you are right about your guess.
My external hdd is connected to a usb3 pci card and when my pc comes back from sleep it takes it a few (1-2) seconds to realize its connected (this probably makes sense why it didn't happen when it was connected to the USB2 ports on my MB a few months ago).

A similar issue happens to me with uTorrent where it mentions it "cannot read files from disk" after the pc wakes up.

So is there any way to resolve this? does this happen only when MP is on and the PC wakes up?

 

[RoChess]

This might be more of a question for @fforde then.

At least get those debug-enabled log files ready then and attached to this thread, so he has some useful technical data to look at, as to what is going on.

You can always ship your computer and external drive to him, but log files are a lot easier

 

[ofird]

Set to the Debug level...waiting for the next phenomena

Like! for the idea to ship the PC

 

[ofird]

So it happened again, some movies got and then rescanned into Moving Pictures.

Here are the log files (debug level)

hope it shows somethng

 

[RoChess]

movingpictures.old.log at the very end shows:

21-Dec-2012 14:33:06 Info [ DeviceManager]: Volume Offline: J:
21-Dec-2012 14:33:06 Debug [ MovingPicturesGUI]: OnVolumeRemovedJ:
So your "J:" drive is messing things up by going offline. Is it like one of those green drives that turns itself off?

Hopefully @fforde can use your same log files to maybe add additional code that will prevent this from happening, but until then you can perhaps look at what is different about J: drive versus the others. Most manufactors of green drive offer tools to adjust the settings on the drive as to when it goes to sleep/etc. You also got OS settings and BIOS/controller settings you can adjust.

 

[ofird]

Yes, so the basic assumption is correct

I own a Seagate goFlex 2TB connected to USB3 card in my pc via USB3 cable.
I assume its the IDE card which takes time to wake up, its drivers are labeled as "Renesas USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller - 0096 (Microsoft)".
There is no "power options" tab in the Device Properties dialogue.

The HDD shows as "Seagate FA GoFlex Desk USB Device" in the device properties and has no "power options" either. It does however have the option for "high performance' policy which can enable cache writing to the disk (currently disabled).

I assume that if the application waits (or re-attempts) in another second or two it wouldn't be an issue.

How can we fix this?

 

[RoChess]

Create a Google code issue and then be very patient. If you get enough others to vote on the issue it will help to promote attention from the developers to it.

You can also hang out on IRC on #moving-pictures channel on Freenode servers and hope to catch one of the developers at a rare time they have nothing else to do.

 

[ofird]

issue submitted

http://code.google.com/p/moving-pictures/issues/detail?id=1110

its difficult to re-arrange them every time