Mediabrowser Media Refreshing and Validation
The questions and answers below relate to how Mediabrowser refreshes and validates your media.
To begin, it is important to understand the difference between what is a Validation and what is a Refresh:
Validation – this is the process where Mediabrowser interrogates the entire tree of the library as stored in memory/cache and compares it to what is actually on the disc(s) – adding and removing items as necessary.
Refresh – this is the process of asking each metadata provider for an item if it thinks it needs to refresh (which is usually determined by either the date of a file changing or a period of time passing – internet metadata goes “stale” every 14 days). If any provider of an item reports it needs a refresh then refresh will be called on all providers for this item. That usually results in all the metadata being re-built from where ever.
1 – Service Tray App – Scheduled Refresh…what does this do exactly? Does all metadata get re-validated and refreshed? For instance, will a change to description in mymovies.xml be picked up when this runs?
The scheduled refresh does a full validation and refresh on the whole library without forcing images to re-build (but they should build if the item didn’t have one or the image changed). And yes, the change to mymovies.xml will be picked up since the date of the mymovies.xml file will change when edited.
2 – Service App – Manual Refresh… I think I understand what goes on with this. I assume this option refreshes ALL metadata and then any Image options you've chosen?
This does exactly the same thing as the scheduled refresh unless you select options. If you clear the items cache, it will re-build all the items and, therefore, re-build all the metadata for them – minus images. Meaning, if the image didn’t change, the old one in the cache will just get re-associated with the item. If the image did change (defined as the date being newer than it was last time) then it will be re-built.
If you select any of the image options, those images will be forced to re-build. Basically, it will seek out all cache copies of that specific image, delete them and then re-create the image from the original. Therefore, it is not necessary to clear the image cache in order to make images re-build. You should only clear the image cache if you feel it has a bunch of stuff in it you don’t want/need. The re-build process will attempt to create cache copies at the proper display size as defined in the view that contains the item being refreshed. In most circumstances this should work, but sometimes it will not be able to determine this so it will re-create it at either the original size or default as defined in the MB Config.
3 – CTRL + R on a collection/folder – I assume this does a full refresh on the folder and the items in the folder (ie: children), including images? Meaning any changes to something like an Overview description will be picked up?
This will force all metadata to re-build even if it hasn’t changed so it is like doing a manual refresh with clear items cache and primary images selected (but it doesn’t actually clear the items cache). If you use Internet Providers this option can take a significant amount of time and generate large amounts of traffic from the internet.
4 – MB Core – Config Panel – Update Library… What exactly does clicking the update library button do?
This option basically does the same thing that a Scheduled Refresh does in the service tray app. Please see the above for further explanation.
5 – MB Core – Startup of MB – This appears to be a full validation of some kind. What exactly is being Validated and/or refreshed here?
Nothing is refreshed but the whole library is validated at startup. If not much changed this should not impede the UI noticeably. This is unfortunately necessary in order for any new items to show up in the recently added list when you first hit the EHS. Without it, these items will not be there until you travel into the collection that contains them.
6 – MB Core – Navigation from one collection to another in MB – This used to do a full validation and metadata refresh. What exactly is going on now? Does MB really do a full validation upon startup as well as another validation when we navigate to a collection?
Basically, it is doing a quick validation and, if it finds something new or changed – it refreshes. Previous versions were unintentionally doing a full refresh on the collection at this point.
Related to:
2.3.0 (Draco release)