One thing to note: it seems to only affect thumbnails of certain views. When I use the List view, everything seems to work, but all Wall views and some others are showing this issue.
Also, as you can see, the CPU load is very high.
There is an additional issue which you can see in the video. After stopping playback, some menu items are stuck in this loading animation for a couple of seconds. This issue was the reason why I decided to do a reinstall as it behaved that way for the last couple of weeks. But clearly the issue still persists, even after the reinstall.
Hmm this is weird. After I shutdown the Vero and also shutdown the Windows PC which has the HDD with the SMB shared attached, all the thumbnails were suddenly there when I restarted the Vero. Maybe the is something wrong with my network.
Still, sometimes when I navigate into the movies library, many thumbnails don’t show. If I then go back to the home screen and enter the library again, they suddenly appear.
I believe Kodi doesn’t cache artwork when it scrapes but when it first accesses it. The high CPU would likely be it downloading the artwork, resizing it, and then saving a cached copy. Give it a bit of time and library scrolling and see where your at.
I now doubt that there is a network problem, because plugging the HDD directly into the Vero didn’t help either. I quickly installed Kodi on my Windows machine and I didn’t have any issues there, so I’m not sure what else to try.
I did a lot of scrolling. The images appear after time, but first it takes ages and when I then return to the home menu and enter the library again, most of images are gone again and the waiting begins again. It feels like it struggles to actually cache the images. Is there some limit on how big a single movies folder can be until it starts struggling? Not talking about the amount of movies but rather the total file size of all items in a single folder.
These messages are fine (just a bit of noise) as the kernel probes on boot. I could hide it but don’t like doing so as it makes it easier to identify actual problems should they arise
You can’t compare running running Kodi on a PC to running it on a SBC. That’s like comparing a race car to a go cart.
Kodi under normal conditions will try to load a set number of images around where your selection is. The process of caching the images is relatively slow and I believe if you scroll on before it finishes with its active cue you might lose some progress at that very moment as it moves on to getting the artwork for the items around where you moved to. If you monitored it using top via ssh while you navigated into your library I’d suspect you could get an idea on how long it was taking to finish any given section you navigated.
Why would Kodi care how big the media files are? For non-episodes it isn’t interacting with the file other than to read its file name, and for episodes if it has to generate a thumbnail it only reads a small part of the file, not the whole thing. I’ve heard of libraries slowing down with extensive libraries once or twice on this forum, but that was with a library so far outside of the norm it really isn’t worth discussing.
Is there free space on the drive? That would be the “limit”.
I did have a thought that maybe a different issue is a play and maybe factoring in. There has been some discussion internally where @Chillbo had found scrolling issues that seem to be related to the length of plot or summary text. German seems to much more likely to be affected than English for some reason. Does switching to a view that doesn’t show the extra text make things work better than scrolling using a view with the extra text? Also, what skin are you using?
I have exactly this issue on the single Vero on which I’ve installed the DV OSMC. I think I might have reported it in the early testing period. I tried reinstalling OSMC but it’s not fixed it. My database is on the NAS. This seems to be an Estuary/DV OSMC issue, my brief testing of the OSMC skin was ok. Given that @Ainsley has reported this I am reassured it’s not an issue with my network (it couldn’t really be a local network issue, as I always test the Vero on the same ethernet cable as the Ugoos).
I’ll be holding back from installing DV OSMC to my other Veros, as it seems there is something broken in the Movie browising.
this has never fixed it my case, Movie thumbnail browsing is persistently erratic with the DV version of OSMC.
this is an exact description of what I experience with Estuary. My non-DV Veros however are perfect (all devices wired back to the same switch and back-end database).
Just to give some information for the others. I asked @ac16161 if he could reproduce the issue I am having in a PM. But I think @ac16161 accidentally came to the conclusion that this issue came with the DV update, but I am certain this is present in all Kodi 21 OSMC releases.
If anyone else wants to try to reproduce this, make sure to scan a movie library of at least 150 titles.
Steps
Have current OSMC installed
Use the Estuary skin
In the movies library, set the view to Wall
Remove all current content and clear all libraries
SSH into the Vero
Stop Kodi using sudo systemctl stop mediacenter
Delete thumbnails and textures cache
rm -r ~/.kodi/userdata/Thumbnails
rm ~/.kodi/userdata/Database/Textures13.db
Restart Kodi using sudo systemctl start mediacenter
Add a movies library with default settings (The Movie Database Python)
Wait until the library is scanned
Go to the movies library
Check if the artwork for all the movies is displayed properly
As an alternative to steps 4 - 8, you could also just reinstall OSMC.
The crappy workaround is to revert back to a Kodi 20 release, scan all your media, and then upgrade to the newest version.
As far as I can tell, this might aswell be a Kodi issue. If I had another device like a Pi 5 I’d test myself installing CoreELEC or some other distro with Kodi 21 and test if the issue also appears there.
