Wrong thumbnails are displayed if video files have the same name, but are located in different folders

• My folder structure is "Name of artist/creator" which then contains all the pictures and video files of said artist/creator without any further folders, and all those files use the same numeration of e.g. 01.mp4, 02.mp4 etc.
• Just now I added 7 new folders, each with video files and pictures using the numeration above, which leads to VLC wrongly displaying all the video thumbnails: either every thumbnail is present, but displayed for the wrong video file, or a few thumbnails are used for 3, 4, 5+ different video files

Expected:

• Proper handling of thumbnail generation which also considers the storage location of those files to properly display the correct thumbnails when there are multiple video files with the same file name, but located in different folders

changed title from Wrong thumbnails are display if video files have the same name, but are located in different folders to Wrong thumbnails are displayed if video files have the same name, but are located in different folders

changed the description

This is in fact a medialibray issue.

My bad, it's in fact a vlc-android issue. I am moving it back to the Android repo.

moved from #2014 (moved)

mentioned in issue medialibrary#330

moved from medialibrary#331 (moved)

mentioned in issue medialibrary#333 (closed)

changed milestone to %3.4.x

assigned to @Aza

mentioned in merge request !988 (merged)

closed with commit fb33ec3f

closed with merge request !988 (merged)

I've been experiencing something odd recently, or at least I think it only started happening recently.

Almost all the videos (but not all) show the thumbnail of a different video in the Browse view.

The videos are in the same local directory, and don't have the same name (of course). The videos are of different nature; not the same source. They for sure have different titles, or an empty title.

In the screenshot, only the first two videos have the correct thumbnail. The rest seem to be borrowing the one from the first video.

The first two videos are the oldest in the directory. It's like thumbnails stopped being generated recently. (I've been periodically installing the latest nightly. Currently using last night's beta build.)

Any thoughts?

After clearing the media database (via the Clear media database option in the menu), all thumbnails have been correctly generated.

I'll keep an eye on this.

The issue is still ongoing.

Once again, a thumbnail from a different video is being assigned to a bunch of other, unrelated videos.

Note the blue-ish thumbnail; it should only be assigned to one video, but it's like it's being reused for other videos as well.

@Aza, any thoughts on this?

Are you using the nightly version? The fix is not release in the Play Store version yet.

Yes. I'm using the nightly builds (the beta builds now), which I update periodically.

So this is probably not related to this issue. What would help a lot would be a db dump (More > Settings > Advanced > Dump media database) and your whole thumbnail folder ([Internal memory]/Android/data/org.videolan.vlc.debug/files/medialib.

You can either create a new confidential issue if you want or send it to me to the email linked to my account.

Just noticed the issue in a different device, using last night's beta build:

Three different clips using the thumbnail of an old clip that is no longer in the directory. (Actually, the clip was never in this directory.)

Clearing the database to force the thumbnails to be generated still works as a workaround.

Certainly something in the code must be identifying these thumbnails incorrectly, with a naive hash/key, perhaps?

As I said, it will unfortunately be hard to understand without a dump of your db and your whole thumbnail folder. Could you please share it (privately)?

I managed to reproduce the issue in an AVD (Android 12), using last night's VLC beta build:

This is the database dump at the time: vlc_media.db (at least this is the file VLC generated, but I'm not sure it is very helpful)

The reproduction steps seemed pretty straight forward, really:

• Download a bunch of random clips.
• Open VLC.
• At this point, thumbnails were displayed correctly for all the 5 clips I downloaded.
• Close VLC.
• Reopen VLC.
• At this point, all 5 clips were showing the same thumbnail.

Demo of the issue:

Note that this happened with a fresh Android installation, totally unrelated to the other two devices where I had spotted the issue originally. I would be surprised if this is not something that everybody is seeing!

In the past, I've blamed issues like this to the Android's view/layout system, where View instances are annoyingly recycled inadvertently... However, killing/restarting VLC should help in those cases, but it does not, making me doubt the issue is related to that.

Clearing the media database does solve the problem, until more clips are downloaded and get affected by this. I think it is important to mention that, once the database is cleared, the issue won't occur again to any of the existing videos. Only videos downloaded after clearing the database will be affected then.

I have not attempted to build/run VLC locally, but I believe adding some logging and then exercising the issue should give a clear answer.

Could you also please share a zip with the content of /sdcard/Android/data/org.videolan.vlc/files? It would help us understand where the issue might be.

marked this issue as related to #2005 (closed)

Any update on this issue? I have exactly same issue happened on Android 12, VLC 3.4.4 Beta 2.

I am running VLC version 3.4.4 on android 12 and I am also having this issue.

Could you try the latest beta and tell us if you can still reproduce it please ? We have had trouble reproducing this, and some improvements have been made regarding thumbnails, so this might be fixed in the latest version.