[Fixed in v7.1] v7 upgrade problem with Sync

[Pauven]

Yes, a dedicated NAS is better, especially as soon as you move beyond 1 HTPC.

What you're proposing will work, but has its own headaches. One of my users has over a dozen USB drives with his collection spread out over it, and years ago we worked together for months on workarounds and fixes so that CMC would work well in this difficult environment. While we got it working, it's not a solution I would wish on anyone. And I will not be providing help for anyone who wishes to go in that direction - been there, done that, never again.

Besides, what you're proposing is literally going in the wrong direction. Once again, you're doing mapped drives, which Binnerup explicitly says My Movies does not support. You'll have local drives on the main PC, but mapped for any other PC's. This creates an inconsistent experience and will likely be a nightmare to deal with.

Your cheapest option is literally to keep your current NAS and just upgrade the HDDs. And switch to using UNC paths, get away from mapped drives.

And if you are sick of your NAS, then buy a new one. These days a simple 2 or 4-bay NAS is not that expensive, and probably works much better than your now very old NAS hardware.

And if you want something even better, create an Unraid NAS using spare PC parts. You can buy a basic Unraid license for $59, it will work with up to 6 drives, and it will turn any collection of PC parts and HDD's into a really nice NAS. Unraid is ideally suited to storing movie media, and you can even get some data loss protection by adding an additional drive to act as the parity drive. Unraid is really flexible, scaling from very small NAS to very large NAS - I use it on my 24-bay 97 TB server, and I'm slowly upgrading drives on my way towards my 160 TB goal. Your drives don't even have to be the same size, mix and match as you please. And as long as you're not running lots of VM's or Dockers, Unraid will perform quickly on even old, slow hardware.

[Pauven]

I had already changed to UNC quite some time back due to incompatibility with something, somewhere. Did you see something different in my logs or something? Maybe I missed something somewhere. The Y:? reference I made was just something I found and discussed about the MM logs timestamp thing.

My mistake. Yes, the Y: reference was probably part of it. I think you also separate your movies into parent folder by first letter. And a few posts back you mentioned that you cleaned up a foldering monitoring reference to the Y: drive too.

I see your UNC path is to \\wdmycloudex4\..., I assume that is a WD NAS solution, with a cloud component. Sounds like something to avoid. Asustor, Synology, QNAP, those are the type of NAS devices I would consider.

EDIT: I'm also confusing you with other users. For some reason, over the past few weeks I've had about 10 users reach out for help, all with different things. This is way more than I'm used to, and I seem to be getting confused on a few details, like thinking you had local drives or separate your movies into alphabetic folders. I recall now that this is someone else I've been helping this week.

[robert5733]

Would this be a cheap option? I don't think I will ever require more than 16Tb, after 20 years I am only at 10Tb, so this would make a compact option for traveling without needing to go the server route. Throw a 16Tb hard drive in my primary PC and put the movies on it. Share the folder. It would then have a UNC path like your CCC Netshare folder, \\masterpc\ccc, only it would be \\masterpc\movies\title 1. Run MM and CCC on the master, reroute MM to that share, CCC would export that path from MM, and the slave would connect to CCC on master for XML and artwork and retrieve movie from the share path to play.

[robert5733]

Nevermind, opened my mouth too quick. They don't make 2.5" in 12Tb or 16Tb yet.

[robert5733]

Curious thing in v7. Got errors for export on 3 titles for missing metadata in MM. They were Harlem Nights, Boomerang, and Coming To America. I don't have these movies, and they are not in my MM database. Didn't happen in v6. MM log has no reference to Boomerang in it.

These are probably referenced in a box set or movie collection, and CCC is trying to export the full collection. This could indicate bad data in My Movies, possibly even some corrupted data. CCC can't hallucinate these movie names, it only knows about them because MM referenced them, and CCC is simply trying to export them.

You're right, google told me there was a box set with these three and Norbit. I have Norbit so I checked it out. There is nothing in the GUI that says anything about box set. Looked at the MM XML and sure enough there it is. All four of them. Checked imdb and it does not say box set, just something in MM that is getting or made bad data.

MM as the culprit once again.

[Pauven]

You're right, google told me there was a box set with these three and Norbit.

Not sure why I didn't realize immediately that these were all Eddie Murphy movies. Sometimes a box set includes individual movies in clamshell cases, and sometimes distributors break out the box set and sell the titles individually. Perhaps that's what happened here, and a movie originally part of a box set was broken out and sold separately. Or more likely, a contributor just messed this title up...

Would this be a cheap option?

Yeah, that would be cheap, and it does sound viable. The key here would be to share the USB drive, and then point MM and even CME/CMC at the share, not the drive letter. So long as you never use a drive letter, always the share mount point, then that allows you to easily expand to more PC's, and keeps you in compliance with My Movies requirements.

If you go with the larger 3.5" size, there are lots of 16TB options under $300. You could keep your current 10TB NAS as a backup, too.

I have used 5 of the Seagate Expansion Desktop 16TB USB drives as part of my backup solution, and they've worked great and no failures. The drive inside is actually an enterprise grade EXOS drive.

In my opinion, it's best to avoid any cloud software. I've started to wonder if your WD NAS running cloud software might be a factor in your performance issues. I think you said something about turning off the cloud features, but I didn't connect that to your NAS at the time. Sounds like you've already addressed this, but if by chance you didn't, I can't help but wonder if cloud syncing by your NAS could be a big part of the root issue.

[robert5733]

I was just thinking I have an empty internal 2.5" in my NUC, but that won't happen anytime soon, till prices drop dramatically. Too expensive, I will stick with what I have for the foreseeable future.

I've tried searching the forum and haven't found info on my next question. My kids(and grandkids) have asked me about getting them on this endeavor. They have an older house that is not wired for ethernet. They would like to have a PC in their rooms and be able to watch movies. Can this be done over a standalone(no internet) wifi network. Master would have internet of course. When update time comes for CMC_CCC , internet would be activated to update, and shut down again on slaves.

[Pauven]

Yes, modern Wi-Fi should be sufficient, though Wi-Fi router quality will be a factor.

About 20 years ago I attempted a Wi-Fi setup, and it almost worked, but connection quality and speeds were not quite good enough for a watchable experience. I believe this was using Wi-Fi 2 tech. Luckily for your kids Wi-Fi has improved a lot.

image.png (90.71 KiB) Viewed 1238 times

Wi-Fi comes in different speed standards, and I think you'd want at least Wi-Fi 5 or faster. Remember, you need this on both your wireless router, and also on your PC's. I'd recommend a Wi-Fi 6 solution, it's been out for 5 years already so should be readily available, and it supports both 2.4 and 5GHz frequencies so you have more frequency options. 6E adds 6GHz which opens up even more frequencies, but if they're in an older home then they probably aren't in a heavily congested area competing for radio frequencies.

Don't worry about Wi-Fi 7, it literally came out this week, and there's very few devices that support it.

You also need a nice router that can handle multiple streams, otherwise having multiple rooms watching simultaneously could be a problem. I think some of the better routers can handle 6 streams or something like that. Just because a router says it has Wi-Fi 6 capability doesn't mean it can handle multiple streams at full speed, so definitely don't pinch pennies on the router, it's the heart of the solution.

With a Wi-Fi setup, you could of course have internet everywhere, but it sounds like that may be undesirable based upon your write-up - perhaps controlling kids access to the internet is part of the goal. CMC/CCC/CME don't need internet at all, so that shouldn't be a problem. You'd want to turn off the check for updates feature, otherwise you would get connection errors on every CMC startup.

[robert5733]

Perfect, I'll talk to them about it this summer when I am up there.

Thank you

[robert5733]

Opened CMC v7 and ran a sync, received errors on all titles for bad .xml, mmTitle.xml.

all title error.jpg (182.18 KiB) Viewed 1172 times

So I decided to check the operation of export and sync. Changed the title of a movie in MMCM by adding a space. Saved the metadata and exited. Opened CME and exported changes. That title successfully exported.

Synced with CME and it gave an error for that title as bad .xml as before. All others are still fine.

one title error.jpg (49.28 KiB) Viewed 1172 times

One thing I found in the logs is during performance logging, in v6 it loads all the information from the metadata

v6 loading titl xml data.jpg (159.92 KiB) Viewed 1172 times

but in v7 it is not loading information

v7 loading titl xml data.jpg (164.1 KiB) Viewed 1172 times

Circling back on the error that started this post. I know you found a bug, and will get it fixed.

Okay, I've reproduced the issue. At first glance, it appears to be a new bug in CMC.

I'm still troubleshooting, I'll update once I know more.

I have v7 loaded and added some new titles today. CMC_CCC seems to work fine, but CMC_CME still has this error. It is not a big deal since I am only using it to back up data for the future. Although CMC is not working with it, Is the data still good that was exported? Or is it bad data that CME exported, and will need to be re-exported once the bug is fixed? Just wondering if I need to keep track of the titles with bad metadata.