Thumbnail issue

Please continue working on this. Many Vero V owners are now affected.

Just FYI, you could switch to another skin, as only the Estuary skin seems to be affected.

I don’t know how to work on this because I don’t know how to reproduce the problem.
Can others confirm only Estuary is affected?

Sam

@ac16161 and @Kontrarian kinda confirmed this already.

Also, both of them also mentioned that devices running the same Kodi version on CoreELEC using Estuary somehow don’t have this thumbail caching issue.

Did you follow these exactly in your attempt to reproduce the problem?

@Ainsley:

Can you recommend a skin that works relatively quickly and reliably and isn’t overloaded?

The OSMC Skin does the job :blush:

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Not really, as I haven’t tried a lot of skins in recent years. The OSMC skin is not overloaded in its default settings, so you could use that. I am currently using Arctic: Zephyr - Reloaded, but you could consider it overloaded, but I kinda enjoy it, cause I like that it allows you to display almost every media flag, but the downside is that it sometimes crashes OSMC, at least on the Vero. Has happened twice while I was configuring it.

I’ve found it easy to reproduce the problem: clean install of OSMC on a Vero, switch to Estuary straight away, point my library at the NAS hosted mysql database, and movie thumbnail browsing is essentially broken. Been this way since the days of the very early DV test builds.

I’m experiencing the exact same problem and might be able to add some clues for Sam to figure out the root cause.

My setup:

  • Vero V
  • Clean install (the Vero was just installed out of the box)
  • OSMC release 2025.03-1
  • NAS connected via Ethernet, containing 500-ish movie titles

Like the others, I’m also seeing the slow rendering of movie poster thumbnails, as well as cast and crew photos – it can take several minutes for every thumbnail to show up on the main menu screen. Also, I’m getting the blue spinner in the middle of the screen when starting playback – usually this happens when playing back HDR titles, although this could be coincidence.

I’ve only seen the problems occur with the Estuary skin. I’ve tried the OSMC default and Amber skins, and they seem to work fine.

I have just upgraded from a Vero 4k+ to the V, and the 4K+ was experiencing the exact same issue (also running the 2025.03-1 release). I had hoped that this was due to the older hardware and/or end of support, but this turned out to be not the case.

I’ve installed Wireshark on the Vero V to check the network traffic as the main menu is slowly rendering. The capture shows that there is NO network traffic to or from the Vero at this point, neither to the Internet nor to the NAS. So, it seems the slow rendering is caused by something entirely internal to the Vero.

When all this is going on, the CPU load on all cores goes to 100%:

As this is a new install, I’m willing and able to run any tests that might be helpful in identifying the cause, provide logs, run test builds, etcetera. If there’s anything I can do, please let me know.

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If the issue is only occurring in the Estuary skin, I think we need to look at the skin specifically.

The commit history is here: History for addons/skin.estuary - xbmc/xbmc Ā· GitHub

Perhaps trying older versions of the skin (and disabling updates for it), will allow us to pinpoint a commit that causes a regression

Sam

I can confirm that the issue only occurs with the Estuary skin. There are no issues with the OSMC skin, and I’ll be using that from now on.

Can anyone tell me how to get movies and TV shows on the home screen with the OSMC skin? See photo.

You need to have the cursor focus on ā€œMoviesā€ or ā€œTV Showsā€ in order to show the covers. They aren’t shown when focusing ā€œVideosā€, but first of all I would suggest resetting the main menu to default. Go to ā€œSettingsā€, ā€œInterfaceā€, ā€œSkinā€, ā€œConfigure skinā€, ā€œGeneralā€, ā€œCustomize main menuā€, ā€œRestore menu itemsā€ at the bottom, ā€œReset to skin defaultā€. When it the asks to ā€œImport menu from skinā€, click cancel. Then go back to the main menu. By default, the ā€œMoviesā€ and ā€œTV Showsā€ section should show random entries.

Maybe reboot your device afterwards.

Thanks for the help.

The OSMC skin isn’t as pretty as Estuary . But at least it works.

I guess that is in the eye of the beholder :wink:

My main issue with the OSMC skin is how much of my screen isn’t being used when I’m browsing movies with the thumbnail view. Estuary shows the same number of thumbnails but at larger scale as it’s using all the screen, via the OSMC skin the thumbnails are much smaller as the whole screen isn’t being used.

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Don’t know what you mean by thumbnail view but by my count, sort of equivalent views in OSMC and Estuary show 7 and 5 and a bit covers respectively.

Ah, if you mean Wall view you get more info in OSMC, but horses for courses.

The OSMC skin is more of a minimalist skin, which I prefer, but it’s not for everyone.
There are other skins that look more like Estuary if you prefer that look.
Just do a web search for ā€œmost popular kodi skinsā€ and see what you like.
The ā€œArcticā€ skins are really popular these days and are highly customizable.
There’s always the oldskool favorites like ā€œConfluenceā€ and ā€œAeon Nox: SiLVOā€ too.

Aeon Nox Silvo works very slowly with Vero V.

Appreciate I’m dragging the thread off topic of fixing Estuary movie thumbnails, but here is what I mean regarding OSMC vs Estuary skins in wall view. With the OSMC skin, there is a large amount of screen real estate not being used, resulting in thumbnails that are smaller than they could otherwise be, yet the number of thumbnails shown is the same as Estuary. Appreciate preferences on this will be subjective.


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