Possible Enhancement

[wrems]

I have a suggestion that would/might help people when getting started with BMT. Especially for the first manual scans of existing media objects. Not active scans of newly added media after BMT has been configured and working properly.

If one has an extensive collection of movies or a bunch of TV series with lots of episodes there can be a huge difference between what the progress indicator says and what BMT is actually doing. I’m impatient and thought that BMT wasn’t collecting fanart for a bunch of my media. In actuality, BMT was working just fine. I realize now that when the scan says it’s complete in the webgui, the scanning is not actually done. It seems to take quite a bit more time than the progress indicator says. Since BMT’s activity is pretty behind the scenes, it’s hard to tell that it’s actually doing anything. If one checks their fanart folder before the scan really finishes one thinks something is wrong with BMT, or if they open up an object in the webgui they don’t see fanart or posters since the scanning is still actively happening, not too mention any kind of caching issues.

What’s helped me is to watch the Networking tab in the Task Manager to tell if BMT is still in the process of fetching/scraping fanart and metadata. If one relies only on the webgui it appears that the scan is 100% finished and all systems should be go, when that’s not the case.

Is there any way to have an indicator that BMT is actively in the process of collecting fanart and metadata even if the scan says it’s 100%?

[stuckless]

When BMT indicates that the scan is 100% done, then the scan is really 100% done

What happens, is that bmt uses separate threads for scanning and downloading. So, all scanning happens in one thread, and then the fanart information gets passed to one or background threads and processed from a queue.

So, the scanning (ie, the fetching of the metadata) is 100% done, but it may take a few hours to before all the fanart is downloaded. This is done because downloading fanart can take several minutes per show and i didn't want the scanner to be hung up waiting.

There are few things that i could do...

1. I could simply limit the number of items that can be put into the background which would cause the main scan thread to block until there is room in the background. (this is probably the easiest)

2. I could provide a screen that shows what is being queued up in the background.

I understand that this can be confusing, and I'll to do something to have it work better.

[wrems]

I see, that makes sense.

What would happen if say a user restarts the service while the fanart is still fetching in the background?

I'm guessing that BMT will happily continue until it finishes.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by wrems

I see, that makes sense.

What would happen if say a user restarts the service while the fanart is still fetching in the background?

I'm guessing that BMT will happily continue until it finishes.

You'd like to think that... but unfortunately, the queues are not persistent... if you restart the sage server while downloading a huge backlog of fanart.. then it will be lost (another thing that needs to be addressed at some point)