Serviio

Doing a little artist research lately I stumbled on to the fact that a couple music folders in my ServiioDB were without any file entries (no files found). I couldn't solve the problem by refreshing the DB or deleting/reentering the folders into the library. On further investigation I find another DLNA server missing these same files. It must be a network drive problem. Working on it still! Still unsolved.

I found browsing (Music/Folders) the Window 8.1 File Explorer "This PC" entries for Serviio very efficient for analyzing the incomplete artist info problem with the folder pane navigation being easier than using the back button to navigate the tree in MediaBrowser. There, I noticed varying degrees of Explorer features not working for Serviio (while they did moreso for Foobar and MediaHome and Mybooklive dlna). But features that did work for local serviio (as opposed to a network Serviio), play video to network renderer for instance, showed this Windows 8 facility very useful. I see elsewhere in this forum that the issue is Windows non-DLNA compliance, but anything Serviio could do to enhance it's use as media server under "This PC" would be appreciated.

I might have noticed when the two Muswic folders of entries were dropped somehow if there was a conveniently placed summary of ServioDB entry statistics like number of Music files indexed and # photo and #videos.It could appear on the console library tab or as balloon on the console status bar icon. These could be compared to my own count and monitored for unexpected changes.

The two different DLNA servers missing significant music files problem turned out to be two different problems. The MyBookLive Media server only needed me to attempt Rescan/Rebuild the third time before all 66,407 music files reappeared. The Serviio missing folders problem looks like it was caused by playlist corruption. Old playlists used no longer applicable drive mapping assignments, files had moved around, ... . I'm not sure how inaccurate playlist entries (LOTS of them noted in the Serviio DEBUG log) caused entire large folders to never appear, but as the mess is being cleaned up the music entries are rolling in.

The ServiiGo android app was helpful in giving folder item counts. Those further music/photo/video summary count numbers are already there! ServiiGo also gives numbers of playlist entries (if the playlist name isn't too long) that will be very useful to flag playlist corruptions in the future.

The Windows 8 "ThisPC" folder view could be very useful. I wanted to compare side by side the media trees (by album, artist, ... ) for different servers. Unfortunately the many DLNA server locations under ThisPC appear, disappear, and then maybe reappear rather quickly and inconsistently - never giving enough time to make comparisons or do any other useful things, for that matter, before the Explorer Window just closes before you. I'd like to try and 'force' a persistent ThisPC Serviio entry. There's some help on the Windows 8 forums. For that I would need to find or know Serviio's "DLNA Media Servers Data Source". As the ThisPC/Access Media/ Search for device never finds anything, I could only try the ThisPC/Add a Network location. The required entry might look something like:

\\192.168.1.xx:8895\folderalias
Does anyone know this network location address?

I have this information for a different server from my router's attached USB Media Server folder's documentation and I am having a little trouble with mapping it as a media server, not a network folder, and it persisting across startups.

12 Mar '15
I wanted to add here that since I've been watching Serviio in ThisPC, for the first times ever I am seeing EVERYTHING about Serviio working, that is gone from just showing all the folders in Serviio with no entries to seeing all the entries (files) under each node of the tree. There is 'metadata art' as icon as well. It gets to the point to realize except for the informative view and having "playto" on a serviio item there it is all quite worthless as it has to download to open locally when that would not be necessary if you can reach/click it in file explorer. Still it is VERY intermittent (disappears, not work next time) and I still have never seen files in WMC.