Serviio

Let me say first, I love my Serviio and the services it provides. I've been a long time user, and bought my Pro license back in 2012.

Running Serviio 1.4.1.2 on Windows 7 64bit

Being able to share media across the network for smart-TVs, various set-top media devices, browsers, what-not - residing within our home - is just what a busy home like ours needs.

In the past couple weeks though, I've experienced an oddity with Serviio... It started when I began re-encoding our video library so that it would consume less disk-space. Most of my media was originally ripped and encoded to MKV format - lately I've been re-encoding everything to MP4 format. In some cases I've been able to get incredible disk-savings - sometimes a 4GB MKV file will consume less than 1GB once re-encoding to MP4 format.

Anyways - I've been moving files, a directory at a time, from the shared library-path of "Y:\Videos\TV" to an alternate storage area, re-encoding the MKV files within, cleaning up the MKV files, and then moving the directory back to the shared library path of "Y:\Videos\TV".

For example:
- move "Y:\Videos\TV\True Blood" to "X:\Working\Reencoding\True Blood"
- run re-encode script against the "True Blood" directory (this part takes some time, obviously)
- spot-check each new MP4 file (open each new video in player, watch the first few minutes, skip to half-way, watch a few more minutes, skip to end, watch a few more minutes)
- clean-up the MKV files
- move "X:\Working\Reencoding\True Blood" back to "Y:\Videos\TV\True Blood"

I can see in the serviio.log file, that the videos eventually get re-added to the library on the next scan - example:
serviio.log:2014-08-26 20:58:52,949 INFO [LibraryAdditionsCheckerThread] Added file 'True Blood - S07E01 - Jesus Gonna Be Here.mp4' (title: Jesus Gonna Be Here) to Library
serviio.log:2014-08-26 20:58:54,402 INFO [LibraryAdditionsCheckerThread] Added file 'True Blood - S07E02 - I Found You.mp4' (title: I Found You) to Library
serviio.log:2014-08-26 20:58:55,675 INFO [LibraryAdditionsCheckerThread] Added file 'True Blood - S07E03 - Fire in the Hole.mp4' (title: Fire in the Hole) to Library
serviio.log:2014-08-26 20:58:56,924 INFO [LibraryAdditionsCheckerThread] Added file 'True Blood - S07E04 - Death is Not the End.mp4' (title: Death is Not the End) to Library
serviio.log:2014-08-26 20:58:58,272 INFO [LibraryAdditionsCheckerThread] Added file 'True Blood - S07E05 - Lost Cause.mp4' (title: Lost Cause) to Library
serviio.log:2014-08-26 20:58:59,698 INFO [LibraryAdditionsCheckerThread] Added file 'True Blood - S07E06 - Karma.mp4' (title: Karma) to Library
serviio.log:2014-08-26 20:59:00,902 INFO [LibraryAdditionsCheckerThread] Added file 'True Blood - S07E07 - May Be the Last Time.mp4' (title: May Be the Last Time) to Library
serviio.log:2014-08-26 20:59:02,059 INFO [LibraryAdditionsCheckerThread] Added file 'True Blood - S07E08 - Almost Home.mp4' (title: Almost Home) to Library
serviio.log:2014-08-26 20:59:03,650 INFO [LibraryAdditionsCheckerThread] Added file 'True Blood - S07E09 - Love Is to Die.mp4' (title: Love Is to Die) to Library
serviio.log:2014-08-26 20:59:05,072 INFO [LibraryAdditionsCheckerThread] Added file 'True Blood - S07E10 - Thank You.mp4' (title: Thank You) to Library
serviio.log:2014-08-26 20:59:06,284 INFO [LibraryAdditionsCheckerThread] Added file 'True Blood - S07E10A - The Final Scene - Thank You (Series Finale).mp4' (title: Thank You) to Library
serviio.log:2014-08-26 20:59:07,712 INFO [LibraryAdditionsCheckerThread] Added file 'True Blood - S07E10B - After the Finale (HBO).mp4' (title: Thank You) to Library

I go to one of our various TVs, which finds Serviio automatically via DLNA I assume, and browse to the appropriate folder, and I'll only see Episodes 1,2,3,10A, and 10B.

I browse to the built-in MediaBrowser via a web-browser from one of the various machines in our home, and I see all available episodes.

Even if I remove the "True Blood" directory full of new MP4 files, and replace it with the previously-existing directory full of MKV files, I get the same outcome - which is the biggest stumper of them all. I originally assumed something was wrong with my re-encoding technique - but since I can put back the original files and experience the same problem, I'm completely confused.

In-response to the problems I've been seeing, I've upgraded Serviio to 1.4.1.2 from an earlier 1.4 release - which didn't help.
I've also gone the route of moving the ./library/ directory out of the way, setting everything up again from scratch and letting Serviio re-scan our entire video library (which takes quite a long time with over 4TB of video files).

Neither helped resolve the problem.

I'm not seeing any error messages in the serviio.log - so I'm not really sure where to start in troubleshooting this problem. I thought about maybe turning "up" the logging level of Serviio, but wasn't sure how to do that, and didn't want to muck things up any further.

If anyone can offer any suggestions, I'd be most grateful.

Best -
- Chris

Have you tried to remove Serviio from your TV's server list, the TV's entry from Serviio's renderer list (it's in the Console) and let them re-detect each other?

Are your various TVs various makes and models, too, using different Serviio profiles? Do you experience the same behaviour on all of them?

@Lowlander:
- That's a great idea - thank you. I hadn't thought of removing the Serviio entry from each individual TV.
- Yes - the various TVs and set-top boxes are using two or three different Serviio profiles, but I see the same behaviour on anything using DLNA. Even my wife's Windows 8 tablet, come to think of it, has the same missing videos as the TVs if she connects to the "DLNA server" (shows up as "Generic" in Serviio) - but if she uses her browser to connect to the MediaBrowser things work fine.

I'll be sure to give this a try tonight, once I get home.

Thanks
- Chris

I just realized that the erroneous behaviour shows on each and every DLNA client in your busy household. Which makes a client/server sync problem kind of less probable. If you want to go that path anyway, clear the entire renderer list from the Serviio console and be sure to have notes of any devices that were manually assigned to specific profiles.

Have you tried to move some encoded episodes to a different folder, so that they are re-detected at a different path/location?

Do you make use of Serviio's online metadata feature for TV series?

Its possible that the TV doesn't like the few episodes' format. Normally it should be sorted by a profile (check you have the right one)