Okay, I’m having a problem with the movie thumbnails/info loading extremely slow while scrolling through the pages of my Media Library. It happens with both the “next page” button and the left/right arrows. The Media Library will become so bogged down while scrolling through pages that navigation is almost impossible, and you can’t even select a movie. I’ve noticed that if I reset the Time Capsule, things seem to improve temporarily. I’ve also plugged the USB drives directly into the SMP, and it does the same thing, so I don’t think it’s a TC issue.
Here’s my setup:
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WD SMP connected to Apple Time Capsule (TC) via cat5 ethernet (1gbps)
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Two USB hard drives connected to TC and shared
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Both USB drives networked from WD SMP and added to Media Library
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Get Content Info currently set to manual only
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Media Library on (obviously), and auto scan set to “during standby only”
The movies play fine over the network, and they are uncompressed 1080p blu-ray rips in .mkv format, with complex audio formats. This would seem to indicate that it’s not a “speed” problem. So, here are my questions:
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Why does this device take so **bleep** long to propogate the movie thumbnails and info (called moviesheets, right?) when I scroll through the pages in the Media Library?
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What can I do to fix this?
Connect via DLNA media server, rather than network share, and the thumbnails display much faster.
For example, I use Twonky on a QNAP NAS, and edited the “view-definitions.xml” stylesheet to include albumart=‘1’ in the container for video folders to also display thumbnails for folders, and it’s very quick that way. Personally I don’t bother with the media library as it’s too slow.
(via WinSCP)
file = /share/HDA_DATA/.qpkg/TwonkyMedia/resources/views/view-definitions.xml
<container name=‘byfolder’ id=‘video/folders’ albumart=‘1’ class=…
<container name=‘byfolder’ id=‘picture/folders’ albumart=‘1’ class=…
N.B. subtitles don’t work when connecting via media server, so you have to reconnect via network share if you want to watch a subtitled film.
Preformatted movie sheets (with the text burned into the background image) display faster than dynamic data, but require a custom theme and some software to create the images.
Thanks for the tip! That would require new hardware though, right? I’m not sure I want to spend money just to overcome the WD’s limitations, ya know?
It seems that restarting the Time Capsule every few days seems to help with the thumbnail/movie propagation speed in the Media Library. I’ll just keep doing that until maybe there’s a firmware fix (yeah right).
Sorry didn’t know your apple device doesn’t do DLNA, not much help then. But it’s quite normal, WDTV thumbnails are slow via network share TADTS.
