Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[dennismf]

I am using Media Center 13.0.123. However the behaviour I am about to describe has been present for some time.

I use a notebook computer. At home it fills the role of Media Center PC. However it is often used away from home in both professional and personal capacities. At home my Media Center library and media files are stored on an external (USB) disk drive. Media Center is the default program for most media files on this system. Consequently, if I open a media file while away from home, MC 13 cannot find my main library and switches to a default library stored on the C drive.

If this library switch occurs (quite frequently) MC 13 seems to loose most (but not all) of the Video file thumbnails. When I reconnect to my main MC Library (USB drive), MC 13 always starts to rebuild thumbnails for over 500 of the 1000+ Video clips stored in the library. This takes quite some time and impacts machine performance until all thumbnails are recreated.

Under Tools / Options / Tree & View / Thumbnails, Thumbnail exit behaviour is set to Leave.

The default library on the C Drive contains an old version of the MC library. There are 977 videos registered in the old C Drive library and 1167 file registered in the main library on the external drive. However over 500 thumbnails are recreated whenever I switch from the default to the main library. Some of the vidoes registered in the old library are no longer present in the main library ( I do not know how many). All of the media files registered in both libraries are only present on the external USB drive and are generally not visible when the default library is activated.

That was a bit long winded

This looks as though MC 13 cannot support multiple libraries with different videos / thumbnails in each library.

Am I missing something?  Is there a way to retain these thumbnails between library switches?

Thanks in advance.

MC is my favourite and most frequently used piece of software.

[JimH]

My first guess is that your library is stored on a removable drive and when it isn't available, MC fails.

Double check your settings too.  MC can erase thumbnails on exit.  You don't want that.   Take a look at other thumbnail settings.

[dennismf]

My first guess is that your library is stored on a removable drive and when it isn't available, MC fails.

Double check your settings too.  MC can erase thumbnails on exit.  You don't want that.   Take a look at other thumbnail settings.

MC does not appear to fail (no error messages). If my main library is off-line, MC seems to silently switch to the default library created at install. The only other option I can find relating to Thumbnails is under Libraries and Folders / Build Thumbnails. This is checked. Can you suggest others that I cannot find.

I just ran a test. MC was started with my main library on-line. All thumbnails were visible/stable. I manually switched to the default library (C Drive). I then manually switched back to my main library (USB), no errors occurred. When I checked the Video catalogue. Many thumbnails were missing and MC is now rebuilding them.

Regards
DennisMF

[Alex B]

MC saves thumbnails for each library separately, and can preserve the thumbnails even thought the media files are temporarily offline, but I have never tested what happens if also the library files are offline.

Long time ago (and for a short while) it was possible that a cloned library didn't have an unique internal ID number and MC created only one thumbnail folder set that was constantly resetted because it was always out of sync when a different library was loaded. You could test if that is the case by cloning one of the libraries with the current build and deleting the source library after that.

In any case my advice would be to use library locations that are always available. The library files don't consume lots of disk space. If you do this you must configure the Auto-Import tool to preserve offline drives if want to use it for cleaning externally deleted files - i.e. use the Fix broken links: Yes (protect network drives) option. Otherwise you can switch this feature off.