Getting status of video index generation

[Daniel_Amaya]

I have ~2PB of data (local, 4 unRAID towers), around 10k shows (hundreds of thousands of episodes), and 20k movies/docs/etc. Channels has been running for a week now "Regenerating video index for...". Meanwhile, the UI is incredibly slow. For example, going to Virtual Channels page takes about 90 seconds to load. Trying to add content to a virtual channel and search doesn't even filter the shows (or maybe it does if I give it more than 15 minutes??). I'm about ready to remove the Docker container and just move on from the application, but before I do I just want to see if there's a way to see how much longer whatever Channels is doing is going to take. Maybe it's almost done and I just need to be patient, or maybe it's only 2% done and I just need to remove the container and move on?

EDIT: I decided for now not to move on/remove the container. I'm going to see if I can simply add the shows/movies I want in Channels (i.e., the show that will be associated with virtual channels) rather than my entire library. Hopefully this works. I blew away the Docker container, deleted all directories associated with the container and am now starting over.

[chDVRuser]

@Daniel_Amaya

Regenerating video index

Turn that off

Some of the defaults they come up with are good, some not.

[Daniel_Amaya]

I wasn't even able to uncheck the box. The UI was slow AF. Also, from what I can see, the devs don't recommend unchecking the box. For now I'm just going to tag shows with their respective channels in Sonnar, then hit 'http://localhost:8089/dvr/scanner/paths/tv?path=' to add the shows that are tagged. That way I don't have to deal with my entire library in channels. Also worth noting, I checked the logs before blowing things away and each episode would take 30-60s to regenerate indexes, meaning it would have taken around a year to do my entire library of TV shows.

Fascinating, with a smaller library it is taking about 1-4s per episode now.

[chDVRuser]

@Daniel_Amaya

Also, from what I can see, the devs don't recommend unchecking the box.

Then ask them why not.
Whatever, Only trying to help as a long time user.

[Daniel_Amaya]

disabling this feature will cause the transcoder to insert more keyframes than would be efficient which will lower the over-all quality of the transcode. It's best to keep this setting on if you don't have a very strong reason to disable it.

From here: Regenerating Video Index - #12 by eric

Appreciate the help btw. I just figured it is easier not to do it this way, and I don't plan on putting every one of my shows in virtual channels anyway.

[chDVRuser]

Whatever.
I don't use them anyway.

Can someone explain generating video index?

These video indexes record the location of "keyframes" in the video files which allow us to be more efficient in how we handle transcoding. It makes our adaptive bitrate transcoding better and more efficient and can sometimes allow us to avoid even using ffmpeg for some remote streams.

WholeTopic

Regenerating Video Index

Hello, Is it possible to disable the "regenerating video index" process? Some background. I have my data all on a remote server and my local Channels server reads the media via a sshfs mount using rclone. Issue 1: As it's a remote storage drive the regeneration process is taking hours and will last for days on end as its using my internet connection to index the files. Issue 2: The rclone mount is configured to use its vfs cache. rClone caches the files in chunks, so as an example when Plex …

[Daniel_Amaya]

I will say though, for future reference it'd be nice to have a guide of best practices or something for large libraries. I'm honestly a bit surprised it takes this long to generate the indexes. Is it doing something more than Plex? Is it really worth doing beforehand?

Also, my only other complaint about the software is the inability to match up metadata. I don't even know wtf the show it matched for Married with Children was, and Better Call Saul matched to some "Behind the Scenes of Better Call Saul," or something to that effect.

[eric]

@Daniel_Amaya

Also worth noting, I checked the logs before blowing things away and each episode would take 30-60s to regenerate indexes, meaning it would have taken around a year to do my entire library of TV shows.

Sounds like a disk IO limitation. If you look at your IO Utilization you will likely see it at 100%.

If you have a slow disk and a lot of files, disabling the setting sounds like the right trade off to me.

If you run the Resource Intensive tests in troubleshooting and send diagnostics, we'll know more.

[Kryptonyte]

@eric

the Resource Intensive tests

That is a fantastic tool.