Jump to content
C4 Forums | Control4

MyMovies and C4


Recommended Posts

I have been using the C4 driver for collection management with MyMovies (previously an Extra Vegetables driver) for the last few months. It took me months to get MyMovies itself working properly, but once I did, it was great and the C4 driver was also great. However, the driver seems to have stopped working over the last month or so and I am at a loss. Sadly, so is my dealer. In short, I rip new disks (legal DVDs or Blu Rays) to my server and they appear in MyMovies Collection Management and on the MyMovies App but do not appear in C4.

My dealer took the server away for a week. Fiddled a lot and when we plugged it back into my network, C4 updated its database of metadata but when I ripped another disk, I was back to the same problem of C4 not updating.

If we turn the debug facility on for the driver in composer, it appears that the connection is regularly timing out. Not sure if this is normal or a hint as to the problem. If I try to rebuild the database it fails completely...

Has anyone seen anything similar to this or have a suggestion? I am baffled and more importantly, so is my dealer!

Link to comment
Share on other sites


Ok, so we re-entered the API key... Still no change.

Looking on the LUA tab, we get the following message each time the API key is changed:

08/20/15 21:26:57 : Found My Movies Home and Essentials Server Solution, Version: 5.1.3.102

[string "Lua Code"]:2279: attempt to index global 'MediaIDs' (a nil value) (OnConnectionStatusChanged)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks Gary... That does not sound very hopeful! We reinstalled the driver today and that changed the problem... Now it loads the first 24 movies of my collection (about 10%) and then gets no further... The LUA messages in debug mode indicate that it is is timing out...

Exact message:

EVQ - Timeout while connected - Count 1 on connection 6001

connection lost, retrying connection in 15 seconds

Then it finds everything, notes a valid IP address and MyMovies found, before repeating the above error message... This then loops forever.

Any suggestions would be welcome!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

it can take QUITE awhile before it's done that - I'd wait for at least a few hours if you have more than a 200 movies - a rebuild requires a check of the old, clearing the old, re-tagging the old still existing and rescanning for new stuff...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Excuse my ignorance... No idea what wire shark is... I am trying to get my dealer in again on Monday but think he is as stumped as I am!

I have tried rebuilding 3 or 4 times and it stops at the same place every time. Having watched more carefully, it does 24 in the first couple of minutes. Another 20 or so 10 minutes to 30 minutes later and then nothing...

I am beginning to think the problem is some form of corruption in MyMovies and have tried optimising the database and resetting all the collection numbers but the problem remains unchanged!

Really stumped (and I think I am driving my wife nuts who is not a great believer in 'my system')..

Link to comment
Share on other sites

We had the same issue, you need to do a full removal of my movies and clean install.

 

EVQ - Timeout while connected - Count 1 on connection 6001
connection lost, retrying connection in 15 seconds

 

Like we said before this did come back and now we run a separate laptop with My Movies 4, which links to C4.

 

We however do run 5.13​ on windows 10, but do not use that API for C4 - This is used for viewing movies on Ipads via the my movies app.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks Gary, sounds like it may be a bug in the C4 driver then. A pity if that is the case and hopefully they read this thread! Did the problem, by any chance, start when you started converting disks to other formats (using the MyMovies video converter)? This is the only thing (to do with MyMovies) that I have done recently that is different from what I did before. Also, interestingly, before I started fiddling, the first title not to appear (44 = 24 + 20 were appearing) was the only Blu Ray that I had converted to MP4 and m4v.

I did try removing the converted file and the MyMovies link to this file and it was no better!

If that was the problem, I guess that I could do without converting to other formats to keep C4 working... Not ideal though.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ok, so I have spent loads of time today investigating further and think I understand the problem. Gary, your comments got me thinking as to what the problem was. Thanks! The following comments may helps users with a similar problem. I will also post something similar in the wish list section in the hope that C4 will update the driver to remove the problems observed.

As reported previously, I could rebuild the movie database as often as I wanted and it would always get stuck at the same places. It would get stuck once at a point that I will identify as BluRay A and then get through this after 20 minutes / half an hour before getting stuck forever at BluRay B. I had tried rebuilding 4 or 5 times over the last few days with the same result every time. Around 20 movies were successful in minutes (1 or 2) before Blu Ray A causes a delay (between 20 minutes and an hour) and another 20 or so worked before Blu Ray B whereafter nothing worked again (overnight gave the driver 10 hours to do something but nothing happened).

Blu Ray B is a 2 disk release which my dealer had run a conversion on (to MP4) and the conversion had failed. Thinking of conversion as the possible problem, I played with Blu Ray A (also a 2 disk Blu Ray) in Collection Management (My Movies) and looked at the converted files (blank) as this Blu Ray has never been converted to another format and exited from this pressing OK (not cancel). On leaving the title to view another, I was prompted that information had changed and so I opted to save changes. After this the C4 driver got stuck at Blu Ray A and went no further (including a 10 hour overnight test last night).

This afternoon, I tried deleting BluRay A and BluRay B from my collection on MyMovies and turned monitoring off so that they did not reappear too quickly in MyMovies. Low and behold, rebuilding inside C4 got much further (and quickly). I had two other disks that gave problems. Both were multiple disk releases (one was 4 disks and one two disks. Both BluRay). I also noticed that DVDs are added by the driver much quicker than BluRays. This does not make much sense as all the driver looks at (I assume) is Meta data... I managed to get the whole collection loaded into the C4 UI via the driver except for the 4 titles referred to above. These 4 have reappeared in MyMovies (having turned monitoring back on) but still don't appear in C4

Previously I could get all titles (including these 4) from MyMovies into C4. My dealer added some functionality to MyMovies for me and this may even have involved updating the version of MyMovies. I think I was using 5.12 but not sure. I am now on 5.13 build 2. I have noticed that MyMovies is slower - I think.

My conclusion is that the C4 driver timeout is normal (in order to scan regularly, I guess) and a C4 setting (20 seconds) and that with more extensive MetaData (e.g. Multiple disks or pointing to multiple files - ISO, MP4 etc.) and a slower setup (MyMovies version dependant, impacted perhaps by antivirus software, the speed of the server, network issues etc.) 20 seconds is not enough for "more complex" titles and so the C4 driver keeps looping. I am guessing that my BluRay A needed 21 seconds to process and that once in 60 times (I.e. Once in 20 minutes) it just happened to process in under 20 seconds. Once I added a converted file - albeit just a blank entry - it was never able to process in under 20 seconds.

So for other users with the same problem, my advice is to identify where the driver stops bringing in your collection and remove that title from MyMovies (you will need to move the physical file also or the problem will recur).

Control4, please investigate. My suggested changes:

1. Change the 20 second timeout to, say, 60 seconds...

2. If the TimeOut happens 10 time on the same title, don't try and add that title again but rather add an icon with the title name and corrupt connection - or something similar - as the icon. This would allow the database build to complete and future titles to always either be added or, at least, not hang everything but alert the user to a problem that a dealer can look at.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

Hi all -

Thought I'd add that I have the same challenge. And my solution was to remove those titles (by moving them to a non-monitored folder). My assessment was that some titles timeout as well.

Also, I get errors for some titles that they don't exist even though they do and they play fine. I don't recall the error message exactly (dealers laptop) but it appears that the driver is somewhat less that perfect.

Hopefully they fix it soon. My understanding is that the driver auto-updates. Maybe one day it will just start working...

Will

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 years later...

Hi,

I upgraded from Mymovies 4 to MyMovies 5 recently. I started getting the timeout error and when I tried to rebuild the database in Control4, it would time out at the same movie. So, I deleted that movie from my collection and it would move forward. There were a total of 3 titles that were causing trouble for me. Once I deleted them from my collection, everything else (OR SO I THOUGHT) got added. When I went to look for the movies that I added recently (after the upgrade to Mymovies5), they were not showing up in Control4. 

So, I have two issues.

1. Some movies are causing Control4 to time out in its' connection to mymovies.

2. It is not even seeing the movies that I added to the collection after I upgraded to Mymovies 5. It is almost like Control 4 is looking in a different place (and finding the old data) and adds only those titles.

Chandra

Link to comment
Share on other sites

We had this last week, when we rebuilt the database. 

once we added the deleted movies which stopping the scan (about5) they were discovered over the next 72 hours 

when adding new movies they sometimes come straight in or it takes overnight, not sure why. 

But pur is now fully up to date. 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.