v15 What are stacks:// good for ?
#1
Sad 
Greetings,

Apologies for a long introduction, jump to the end for the real question, the story
about my current setup and how I got there may help newbies in the wonderful
digital multimedia movie world.

Phase 0 - about 10 years ago

Start of the Home Cinema project including 50" Plasma Screen and 5.1 audio ( actually 5.2 because of 2 sub-woofers ).
Then buy Movie DVD's, a bit old school , but wanted the original DVD image and sound quality.
Internet RIP's not even close to the original DVD and of course highly illegal.
The DVD collection went up to several hundred titles, so finding a Movie and feeding the DVD player became a bit of a pain.

Phase 1 - about 5 years ago

Go Digital and select adequate hardware / software.

On the hardware side : Windows 7 PC and Popcorn Hour A200 media player.
The A200 was soon upgraded to A210 just replacing the plastic case with a metal case,
removing the sometimes noisy fan and adding a 1 TB hard drive in the process.

On the software side ( running on Windows 7 PC ) :

- Handbrake to convert DVD to digital video file.
- DVDFab passkey to rip DVD's
- Media Companion to organize the Movie Library and create NFO files
- Yamj to pick up the NFO information and create the HTML interface for playing movies on the Popcorn Hour.

Phase 2 - about 1 year ago

Go open source with mediaplayer and centralize media storage.

While the trusty Popcorn Hour was still performing well playing Movies, the software
on the box became more and more outdated which would eventually lead to purchasing a new
A500 model to keep up with recent firmware ( Android : sounds familiar ?).

New hardware : Raspberry Pi model 2 + HifiBerry Digi+ audio board ( for surround sound ) and Synology NAS.
New Software : Kodi 15 , Openelec version for Raspi 2 and Windows version on PC.

So far so good, but importing the Movie library using NFO only scraper turned out difficult.

The Problem

Most of single movies appeard OK after scanning , which was done on the PC for speed.
Movie sets ( about 40 of them ), would randomly either have missing or double entries.
Nothing wrong with the NFO files, so time to dig into the SQL lite database ( MyVideos93.db )
using a nice free Windows tool called "SQL Lite".
It became clear that several movie set entries where doubled into one referred as
"nfs://bla.bla.......mkv", pointing to the Synology NAS and
another referred as the same , but preceeded with stack:// , so "stack://nfs://bla.bla.....mkv".
Kodi Wiki does speak about stacks as a way to define multipart movies, but nowhere
any reference to this strange stack:// prefix for the actual file location.
My current workaround is using SQL Lite tool to clear the offending stack:// entries
both in the movie and files table. Done that and all movie set related errors disappear
from the Kodi movie library.

Any insight in how these stack:// entries show ow scraping with NFO only settings
would be appreciated.

Francis
Reply
#2
kodi can use stacks if a single movie is split across multiple video files.
for instance, if you have the movie Avatar, but it's split into three separate .mkv files,
you should name those files as follows:
- Avatar-part1.mkv
- Avatar-part2.mkv
- Avatar-part3.mkv
doing this will make sure kodi represents the three mkv files as a single movie to you.

in case you have no such split video files, you can disable this stacking feature:
Settings -> Videos -> File lists -> Combined split video items

some additional info on stacking can be found in the wiki:
http://kodi.wiki/view/Stacked_video#Spli...tacking.29


stacking has no relation to movie sets.
movie sets are multiple movies that can be grouped together.
for instance, if you're a Star Trek fan and have multiple Star Trek movies, you can group them together in Kodi.
this can be done through the interface:
http://kodi.wiki/view/Movie_sets
or through the use of .nfo files:
http://kodi.wiki/view/NFO_files/movies#Movie_sets

and in case you're not interested in this feature, you can disable it as well:
Settings -> Videos -> Library > Group movies in sets
Do not PM or e-mail Team-Kodi members directly asking for support.
Always read the Forum rules, Kodi online-manual, FAQ, Help and Search the forum before posting.
Reply
#3
Ronie,

Thanks for clarifying my understanding for stacked movies and movie sets.
I still need an explanation of where the stack:// movie file names are coming from.
These only appeared for movies belonging to movie sets and where duplicates
for the same movie name with the correct nfs:// file reference.
Removing those directly in the SQL Lite database is an ugly workaround.
Reply
#4
kodi will safe the path of a multi-part movie like this in the database:
stack://nfs://bla/bla/Avatar-part1.mkv , nfs://bla/bla/Avatar-part2.mkv , nfs://bla/bla/Avatar-part3.mkv

if such a path pops-up in your database,
you likely have (or had, at the time you scanned your movies) stacking enabled in kodi settings
*and*
kodi found a video file that matches the stacking pattern.
Do not PM or e-mail Team-Kodi members directly asking for support.
Always read the Forum rules, Kodi online-manual, FAQ, Help and Search the forum before posting.
Reply
#5
Ronie,

You are spot on with your analysis. My movie sets are named "Pink Floyd Pulse Disc 1.mkv","Pink Floyd Pulse Disc 2.mkv",
which is what Kodi expects to see for split file naming aka stacks.

Since I was not aware of the SETS and File Stacking settings, both were OFF ( default ) during my initial scan.
For good measure I deleted all movie sets from the library , changed the setting for SETS to ON and left the File Stacks OFF.
No avail, still double entries in movie table as before, one with nfs:// end another with stack://

As with the first full scan not all movie sets are fully populated. I have to force update several movies from the file list using "I"
to get them into the library.

Thanks again for your insight, it seems the scraping routine is not perfect yet. I can live with a manual SQL Lite debugging for
now, hoping this will be fixed in a next release.
Reply

Logout Mark Read Team Forum Stats Members Help
What are stacks:// good for ?0