[Fixed in v7.0] Movies screensaver not starting

[mikemack]

Any idea why the Movies screensaver feature would not be working? I just did a rebuild of my HTPC machine using Windows 11 and current version of CMC (6.0 2022.1103) with CCC running on my media server and everything is working fine except the movies screensaver will not run. The feature is enabled and the delay is set to thirty seconds but it never starts. I have restarted CMC several times and have had no success.

I enabled the debug logs and combed through them but no errors were logged in any of the logs.

The movies screensaver worked in the previous installation on Windows 10. However, for some reason 4K movies were not playing in the Windows 10 build I had so I rebuilt from scratch on Windows 11 and now that is working but the movies screensaver appears to be the only feature not working.

Any help and guidance is appreciated.

Thanks!

[Pauven]

I've never had anyone report the movie screensaver isn't working before, so I don't have any easy solutions off the top of my head.

The movie screensaver does obey the parental controls from CCC user accounts, so perhaps the parental controls are too restrictive and no movies are qualifying for the screensaver.

[mikemack]

Attached is the user preferences settings from CCC. At first glance I don't correlate anything in these settings that might keep the screensaver from running.
Thoughts??

[Pauven]

I agree, that all looks good.

Just to double-check, your new install is connected to this CCC instance, yes?

[mikemack]

Yes, I run the CCC tests from settings in CMC and both the connection and share test successfully.

[mikemack]

To be more concise, yes, this instance is using CCC and functions properly and tests successfully. All the titles synch without issue using CCC.

[Pauven]

When you open a movie to view the details, is the wallpaper present?

So sorry, my apologies. I've been assuming the screensaver was working for other users, including myself. I just tested it, and it isn't working for me either.

I'm not sure what went wrong, I haven't touched that portion of the code in years. But at least it will be easier to troubleshoot with it misbehaving on my PC too.

I am running Win11 (fully up to date), so perhaps this is a Win11 only issue. I'll have to test some of my other PC's to see if it's broken everywhere and if there's any pattern.

[Jamie]

Looks like you have gremlins too. I don't know how these problems crop up? But, they do show up. Very humbling feeling when they do.

[mikemack]

I would tend to think it's a Win 11 issue since the screensaver was working on my previous Win 10 build with same version of CMC and CCC.

[Pauven]

After some more testing, I can confirm that this is not a Win11 issue. It behaves the same on Win10 and 11. This is as I anticipated, since the slideshow doesn't leverage any windows core functionality, rather it's fully a feature of CMC that's independent of the OS.

I have been able to get the movie screensaver to work, but even then it isn't working correctly. I have 3 user accounts configured in CCC, one for me, one for my gf, and one for guests. The screenaver only works on my gf's account.

Additionally, it only shows one of 4 titles. Even worse, the screensaver is supposed to reflect what you have filtered on the screen (i.e. Movies or TV or Action or Comedy, etc.), and regardless of what filtering I apply, I still get just the 4 same titles included in the slideshow, 2 movies and 2 TV series, and they show even when they shouldn't.

I'm thinking I broke this when I created the new advanced parental filtering features that tie into categories. The problem, best I can tell, is that when CMC builds the list of titles to include in the screensaver (impacted by both parental restrictions and currently displayed titles), it's simply building the list wrong. And if zero titles make it into the list, then it looks like the screensaver doesn't work at all, because it has nothing to show.

I'll have to dig into my code deeper to figure out the solution.