Hi I am thinking of buying a Vero 4K+ and was hoping someone can comment on how long it takes to load thumbnails of very large libraries. I am currently using an Xbox one and while slower than my pc it is completely acceptable. I just want to make sure I can smoothly scroll through all my videos. I would be using the basic Kodi skin and be using posters.
Hopefully I have been clear enough, I have no problem with the initial scraping taking forever I just need to know if once I go into my videos if I will be able to view them without waiting for black boxes to populate with covers.
If anyone could post a video of scrolling through a massive local collection that would be amazing. Thanks.
I have scraped about 6000 files but they are not in a single directory. First of all they are sorted in folders on the hardrive as such:
Movies/sci-fi/moviename/moviefile
Movies/adventure/moviename/moviefile
…and so on…plus in a similar manner for series:
Series HD/animation/dvdboxes/southpark/seasonnumber/files…
They also span over several hardrives.
I dont know how kodi saves this but i suspect a database (sql?) But series will have fever thumbs since you only see the thumb for the entire series and have to go into it so see all seasons.
Movies are a whole bunch and while I dont know if its 1700, it is alot, they took up an entire small room as physical media =P and they scroll through faster then you can see what the picture is without any hiccups whatsoever. Incredible speed.
Only hiccup is to wake the HD as i have them spin down when not used. Photos however in the picture category is extremely slow (unusable even).
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Thanks for taking the time to answer. That is awesome I can deal with hard drives having to spin up causing a movie not to start for a few seconds but back in the day of boxee box it drove me crazy to have to wait for the movie posters to load.
I have 750 movies, and once the images get cached in RAM on the Vero 4K, scrolling is as fast as the auto-repeat on the bluetooth keyboard can handle. The way Kodi works, though, the caching is a multi-step process.
First, you scrape, and images are downloaded (or you have local images with correct filenames). Then Kodi makes a copy of this image and stores it in the Kodi “system” directory (which is stored on the Vero 4K’s built-in flash). This copy is re-sized based on settings in advancedsettings.xml. This is all done during the initial scrape.
Then, when you navigate to a screen that needs an image, the skin you use grabs the image out of the cache that Kodi created. This is the only time you will notice any real delay…first use of an image. After that, the Vero 4K seems to have enough memory to allow Kodi to keep this copy in RAM, instead of having to keep fetching it from disk.
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Perfect I am using Kodi and my library is in perfect order so I am not worried about scraping or even going through slowly once as I had to do that on Xbox as well. Just some interfaces are really really slow loading artwork even after that initial stage. Xbox would have met my immediate needs if not for its lack of audio pass through. I was going to build a second 4K ready pc but $700+ for that vs the under $200 I am going to spend on Vero 4K+ is a big price jump that doesn’t seem justified given it will only be used for Kodi local playback anyways. Thanks guys.
Just to add another data point for you, I have about 1000 movies, 250 TV Shows (13000 episodes), 800 Music Videos and 45K songs,
Accessing the shared MySQL library from my laptop vs my Vero 4K has about the same performance. The 4K wins with a slight edge, but it’s the host of the files and database.
So I suspect that you will be happy with the Vero’s performance 
I just completely re-scraped my library, and it takes the 4K around 10 seconds to cache the images from each screen of my movie wall, which is 22 movies per screen. For the 50 or so images it has to cache (poster, clearlogo, studio logo), that’s not bad, because it has to read the fairly large images using Kodi’s SMB implementation over the 100Mbps link.
After that, there is no delay at all when moving from page to page.
Also, you can just use the Texture cache maintenance utility to cache everything without having to access it in the Kodi GUI, with one line:
texturecache.py c movies
It took a couple of hours to do my 700 movies, but I enabled actor image downloading and caching, and there were nearly 20,000 of those images to cache.