Regenerating Video Index

Channels DVR Server Troubleshooting
#1

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 reads the header to determine the file codec/size etc rclone will only cache the downloaded chunk. I believe Channels is reading the entire file while indexing causing rclone to try cache the entire file and ultimately the entire media directory.

If there are no alternatives, could we get an option to disable media indexing if one does not exist?

#2

Wow. This must be a miserable experience. You are correct that generating the video indexes does require reading the entire contents of the files to calculate.

Everything about how Channels works is centered around the DVR having fast and reliable access to the underlying files. Even without this process, all of the ways that Channels deals with video files expects to be able to have fast random access to the file data. Unfortunately what you're trying to do is unsupported and you're likely going to have a bad time all around.

Sorry I don't have better news for you.

#3

Can you please elaborate?
All my media plays instantly, including 4k media. Seeking media is instant. Loading all metadata is instant.
So what exactly is "bad time all around."? The only issue is that I want to stop the indexing of video.

#4

Why can’t you just run Channels locally and then view the recordings remotely through a VPN or maybe even a Plex server?

#5

That’s exactly what I’m doing.
Plex also has the ability to scan video files but you have the option to turn that off, which I do.

The viewing experience is like having the media locally except for the indexing issue.

1 Like
#6

I meant in reverse then. Run the DVR local to where the media location is instead of it being a “remote storage drive.”

#7

I tried that originally but I didn’t like the fact that you have to jumps through hoops to setup channels to work through a vpn so I moved channels DVR locally.
Again, I want to state this as clearly as I can, the setup is perfect in terms of viewing experience the issue has nothing to do with that but mostly with how channels handles indexing.

1 Like
#8

There are many Plex(emby/jelly) users who use cloud storage, I'm one of them, who see channels as a superior product. I love where Channels is so far and where it's going but this is a problem.

#9

Eric,

It seems you are you saying that remote storage is not supported?
Is it unrealistic to add an option to disable video indexing for "local" media(Movies/TV)?

1 Like
#10

@xtinct101 we're having internal discussions regarding the overall impact on doing this. Even if we do provide a way to do this, please understand that you're definitely coloring outside the lines and may run into hangs, crashes, timeouts, errors and flakiness due to this being something we just haven't been considering in any of the designs of the DVR.

1 Like
#11

I completely understand and accept that YMMV.

#12

We've added a setting in the Imports section to disable the indexing. Please note for everyone else: 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.

1 Like
#13

You and the Channels team are fantastic. This completely fixed the issue.

3 Likes
#14

Just noticed this checkbox on the server status screen. How much work does it take to "Pre-Optimize Videos" when they are first imported, say a user imports 500 videos at one time? When indexing, what exactly is being done?

#15

I am not too sure what is being done on a technical level but I think one of the Devs mentions somewhere what it does.

I don't know what other people experience, but in my setup where the DVR is on a Windows 11 PC with an AMD Ryzen 6 processor and my movies are on my NAS, it takes about 30 hours to process just one of my hard drives that it about 8 TB worth of Bluray rips. These are fairly large files. It takes on average about 8 minutes per file. It takes less time on smaller files. Some of them only take about 2 minutes.

So, to give you some idea, it takes about 4-5 days to run through all my NAS collection of movies. I have about 26 TB in total so I am probably an extreme case.

I have had to do this a couple of times because I switched my server to a different OS a couple of times.

#16
#17

Thanks. Anything that improves the remote experience is great. I know that REW/FF always seem to be a sore spot with the family when connecting remotely, are there any other settings that might improve that?

#18

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