[takoi]

Watchdog is a service that will monitor your media sources and update the library when new files are added. Optionally, the library can be automatically cleaned when files are deleted. Update is instantaneous. Available from the official add-on repository

Report issues in this thread. Please always provide complete debug log. See Log_file (wiki) on the wiki for how to. If you do, it will be looked and I will try to help.


Known Issues

Continuous scanning/cleaning
If this happens you most likely have an application running that continuously reads and/or deletes files in the media source. Remove the offending application or remove the folder from media sources in xbmc. Normally, downloading applications and such should not cause this as all file modifications and creation/deletion of non-media files are ignored.

"Failed to watch x" on Linux
On linux there is a limit on how many folders you can watch simultaneous. If your media sources contains more subfolders than the limit (usually 8192) it will fail. Select "Polling" under "Method" in add-on settings, or increase the inotify watches limit.

Other addons slow to open/won't open at all
Issue in xbmc http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/14212 Only known to affect Polling Fixed in Kodi 15.0 Isengard.



FAQ

If using polling, will it hog the disks and prevent them from spinning down
No. When there's nothing being written to the drives, the OS will usually cache the entire directory structure. If for some reason disk activity persist, you might want to look into increasing the cache space in you OS.

Polling methods:
If you are experiencing performance issues you can select another method for network shares. Here's an explanation of the different polling methods you can choose:

Depth inf. (default): performance dependent on total number of directories and files. Will detect everything, also whether a file was added or removed.

Depth 1: cpu/network cost ~0. independent of number of files

Code:

./media source/
    folder a/  <-- detected (will always scan and clean (if enabled). unknown if it was added or removed)
        folder b/  <-- not detected

Depth 2: performance depends on number of directories and files in top folder (media source) only

Code:

./media source/
    folder a/  <-- detected as new
        folder b/  <-- detected (will always scan and clean (if enabled). unknown if it was added or removed)
            folder c/  <-- not detected