[x86-64] Artwork not showing up in Movies/TV shows 12.0.2

    I did a clean reinstall of v12.0.2 Generic on a older PC (Athlon, AMD internal graphics) and scraped my complete movies collection (>1500) successfully (some scraper errors). On the main menu, artwork is showing up correctly. When I go to the Movies or TV shows menu, most of the artwork isn't showing up. Navigating the items works, all info is there except for the artwork. When I try to refresh a single item, the system gets very slow: refreshing doesn't work, after cancelling (up to minutes) the system is responsive again. No activity visible in the mean time.

    The system has a fixed internet connection. Any ideas what I could look for to solve this?

    Jeroen

    Scraping content into the library creates online references to artwork in the DB, but Kodi does not download and cache the artwork from the online source until you start scrolling around in the UI triggering background downloads of original size art that must be resized and cached/stored, which is a CPU and I/O intensive task. You might have a fast internet connection, but the bottleneck for the Library views on older hardware is always I/O and CPU performance. You'll also see I/O as the bottleneck when scrolling around a large library as Kodi has to retrieve a large amount of art for display. The only way to improve this, esp. with a large library, is some kind of script/tool that walks the library and triggers all the downloads in advance (leave it running overnight, etc.) combined with an SSD to boost the I/O performance, and a skin that uses smaller artwork sizes to reduce the amount of data being moved around. If you want to run fancy skins; run fancy(er) hardware with more CPU grunt.

    If that's the case, I can understand the artwork wouldn't appear instantly after finishing the scraping. However, when refreshing a single item, the updating gets stuck after selecting the right movie or TV show. When cancelling, it takes minutes before the system gets responsive again. I never experienced this before in older Kodi systems with less hardware specs. Today I retested with a fresh install and scraping a limited set of movies. Same issues.

    And if this is normal behavior, why didn't more people complain about it?

    I have a moderately large media collection; around 2/3 the size of yours. I see occasional 'blank items' due to art being retrieved from the internet, but this is only when the install is relatively fresh. I regularly rotate the main family device among a pool of ARM boards for testing. The configuratin of Kodi and media content doesn't change but the Kodi install is effectively new and it takes a while for caches to populate again. After a week of use there are few 'blank items' and I don't notice caching.

    Do you have media on a NAS in the network and a WiFi connection, or is it Ethernet to the NAS, or content is local?. It would be useful to see a Kodi debug log to see timings of actvities and what Kodi is actually doing under-the-hood (what scrapers are being used, etc.). and what errors are reported if any.

    Thanks for your replies. Content is all local with external HDs, around 30 MB/s speed. That shouldn't be the bottle neck. I'll try to get some logging. Maybe I'll try an 11 version as well to see the difference.

    I tried 11.0.6 yesterday and had my full collection scraped with artwork in 2 hours. A couple of reboots were needed as at some point (10-15 mins) scraping got very slow. No problems with not showing artwork however, even during scraping. Imho it's definitely something in the new kodi version. I'll stick to this version for now.

    Even if you can point to something in LE11 or LE12 the next thing we're going to tell you is "update to an LE13 nightly and confirm the issue still exists" .. so better to move forwards with testing than backwards.