These may or may not be related issues or questions, but here it goes…
I’d been doing some upgrades to my library, and Kodi got stuck on “Working…” for some time. I forced power cycle, and it came up with a message about not able to find my backdrops. After a couple rounds of that, it was on the default settings for my skin (Xonfluence). I managed to replace the settings.xml file for that skin in userdata/addon_data with the backup. (It did, incidentally, take stopping mediacenter before replacing that file, because it kept overwriting with the default on exit…)
Previously the only problem I’d been having was that in the skin’s list view, it was often displaying thumbnails instead of posters, when previously it had almost always shown posters.
Questions:
• How likely is it that that skin settings file was the only problem file? Everything looks normal now. I don’t want to restore the full userdata backup, because many changes to database were made since the last backup, and the database itself looks fine.
• How long should one wait on “Working…” before forcing restart? (This was a couple mins for no apparent reason).
• Anyone see posters suddenly being shown as thumbnails as described? Is there a setting like this?
I know this is mostly Kodi stuff, but this community is helpful, so thanks for the indulgence.
I’ve never seen a poster being replaced with a thumbnail. That sounds like something has gone wrong with your thumbnails somehow. You could try stopping Kodi and delete the thumbnails folder and Textures13.db and let it rebuild. This will not affect anything in your library other than the cache.
I’m not sure if the poster was exactly replaced with the thumbnail. It may be that in the skin’s list view, it is supposed to show a thumbnail. But my thumbnails have usually been the same as the posters. When I add (set a new) a poster, it tends to change the thumbnail too to the same.
On a Vero if you have an SD card it normally would not have the database etc. on it, just media.
So I’d say you first try as what @darwindesign suggested and create a new Textures13.db. If you continue to have problems then the next step would be to switch to another skin (OSMC skin would be best for testing) and see if the problem continues.
Yes the SD card has media, but in my case mostly just images, esp. background images. So when it was throwing up errors about backgrounds, I assumed there was an SD card problem. The card also contained backups, so luckily it had a backup of the xonfluence skin file, which as I said I restored – apparently with success.
The thumbnail vs poster things is still puzzling. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the database files. I just note that when I set a poster in that skin, it usually also sets the same image as the thumbnail. What happened in this case is it seemed the “poster” thumbnails got cleared or something, and then the actual thumbnails were regenerated. Again, not sure if the image that’s supposed to be displayed with this Xonfluence skin in list view, is supposed to be a thumbnail or a poster.
Did you just path substitute your thumbnails folder in advancedsettings.xml over to the SD?
If I was to make an educated guess on what likely happened was that the thumbnail for that entry became unavailable and Kodi got stuck looking for the source. If you are storing your thumbnail folder on the SD I would not assume the card is okay just because you were able to recover a single file from it. It may be wise to image the SD, run a full test with h2testw, and if it checks out okay then you can restore the SD card back to how it was from the image file you made.