Ok so first a little about my setup.
I have twonky running on a RaspberryPI along with OpenVPN. The whole point is so that I can play my files when away from home. This worked great a few months ago simply plug in to the internet, the VPN connects and then the shares are connected, and twonky scans the folders. It’s not perfect in that twonky can scan empty folders and remove stuff from it’s database so it kinda screws with the playlists and I can never remember what episode I got upto. But it still works. Then I upgraded to 6.0.39 and things went a little weird. It used to complete a scan within a few minutes. But now it was taking over an hour to complete. For the most part it didn’t really bother me, plug it in and leave it do it’s thing. But if the VPN ever went a bit weird it could cause a full rescan, it also seemed to use more data, previously a few Mb now it could be a few 100Mb.
It was more of an annoyance than anything. I did have a search around but couldn’t find anything that would have caused it in the version changes that jumped out at me.
That is until today.
Today I found an article on Series and Movie thumbnails http://server.vijge.net/tw-video-scraper/ so I grabbed the files. I’m not sure if they work 100% yet, I’m getting a symlink error when I run it manually, but it does pull and save a thumbnail. As I’m watching something I don’t want to restart twonky to test it.
But I noticed in the cgi-bin folder a few other {scripts}, in particular ffmpeg-video-thumb.desc
Now the stuff in the link does say to disable this, but it got me thinking. Is this running on the PI, so I decided to have a look. There’s alot more files in the cgi-bin for 6.0.39 than previous versions, and this will try to make a thumbnail for each video file. So I disabled the code by putting # at the start of each line. It may not be the cleanest approach but I want to be able to put it back if it breaks something.
Restarted twonky on the PI, and watched the status page. It managed to scan everything across the VPN within a few minutes again. And looking at the network stats probably pulled around 10Mb of data.
So I think that’s solved this little problem of slow scanning in Twonky for me.