Directory discovery

[Spike1]

I've just finished a long session wrestling with VLC.

Selecting shuffle play, the pop-up didn't give the correct count of all the songs on my microSD; indeed, 1 of the 30 directories was unselected. I upgraded from Nightly of 2022-12-16 to 2022-12-28 for clarity. Now no directories were selected. Every time I went into Settings and began enabling directories, VLC began discovering files. As I enabled more directories, VLC would crash. I finally got it to see all 2,897 files in the 30 directories, don't know how. Seems that the discovery process is not robust enough to tolerate the user changing the set of permitted directories while discovery is in progress. Am I supposed to wait until discovery is complete before checking the next of my 30 directories?

[Spike1]

Got two crash logs and they both look like this

App version: 3.5.4 Beta 1
java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: No implementation found for void org.videolan.medialibrary.MedialibraryImpl.nativeAddDevice(java.lang.String, java.lang.String, boolean) (tried Java_org_videolan_medialibrary_MedialibraryImpl_nativeAddDevice and Java_org_videolan_medialibrary_MedialibraryImpl_nativeAddDevice__Ljava_lang_String_2Ljava_lang_String_2Z)
at org.videolan.medialibrary.MedialibraryImpl.nativeAddDevice(Native Method)
at org.videolan.medialibrary.MedialibraryImpl.addDevice(MedialibraryImpl.java:137)
at org.videolan.vlc.MediaParsingService.addDeviceIfNeeded(MediaParsingService.kt:241)
at org.videolan.vlc.MediaParsingService.processAction(MediaParsingService.kt:477)
at org.videolan.vlc.MediaParsingService.access$processAction(MediaParsingService.kt:64)
at org.videolan.vlc.MediaParsingService$processAction$1.invokeSuspend(Unknown Source:15)
at kotlin.coroutines.jvm.internal.BaseContinuationImpl.resumeWith(ContinuationImpl.kt:33)
at kotlinx.coroutines.DispatchedTask.run(DispatchedTask.kt:106)
at kotlinx.coroutines.internal.LimitedDispatcher.run(LimitedDispatcher.kt:42)
at kotlinx.coroutines.scheduling.TaskImpl.run(Tasks.kt:95)
at kotlinx.coroutines.scheduling.CoroutineScheduler.runSafely(CoroutineScheduler.kt:570)
at kotlinx.coroutines.scheduling.CoroutineScheduler$Worker.executeTask(CoroutineScheduler.kt:749)
at kotlinx.coroutines.scheduling.CoroutineScheduler$Worker.runWorker(CoroutineScheduler.kt:677)
at kotlinx.coroutines.scheduling.CoroutineScheduler$Worker.run(CoroutineScheduler.kt:664)
at Android.MODEL(SM-S767VL)
at Android.VERSION(8.0.0)
at Android.FINGERPRINT
...
Suppressed: kotlinx.coroutines.DiagnosticCoroutineContextException: [CoroutineId(158), "coroutine#158":ActorCoroutine{Cancelling}@ddf7108, Dispatchers.IO]

[Spike1]

Last two restarts of VLC, ALL FOLDERS ARE DESELECTED.

[Aza]

Sorry for the late answer. I just came back. This is a weird crash as this part of the code did not change in two years. I'll investigate.

[Spike1]

Thanks for investigating. On my last session, I actually saw songs disappearing from the full TRACKS list during music play! I've backed down to 3.5.3 (2022-12-15) for now.

[redZed]

I'm actually having this same issue on VLC 3.5.3. All of my mp3s are stored on an SD card.
Under 'Media library folders' > Storages > 3561-3732 > > music
I have to select the folder every time I open the app.

Edit: I suspect it might be a folder permissions issue or something with the permissions on the SD card but I'm unsure what to do to troubleshoot.

[Spike1]

Yes, I saw that thread. My 30 directories are in fact on an SD card too. However, Android permissions aren't per-device but per-app. Recently, I've rebooted the phone every few days, as it gets sluggish. I wonder if this makes VLC forget my selected folders, or if there are VLC settings that must be set a certain way.

[Spike1]

It continues to fail after reverting to a VLC version that never failed. Can the SD card be failing in ways that make VLC void what it "knows" about the card?

[Spike1]

Problem persists on Nightly of 2023-01-07, even after clearing media database.

PS—This Samsung J7 (And.8) is from 2018 and is being held together by Krazy Glue. I would suspect hardware but two more users report the same thing today. SD card is branded Samsung, not generic. I have 2 other phones with a subset of my collection in internal storage and no such bug.

[Aza]

I am not sure RedZed issue is the same. We were reported that Samsung devices are doing shady things with their SD card in a recent update (changing it's path when it shouldn't). We are also looking into it.

@Spike1: what would be helpful would be a media db export (In the advanced settings) before and after the issue.

[Spike1]

vlc_media was 3.3 Mb. Took it to the PC and viewed it with Wordpad and it seemed to be SQL. Put it back and some folders were already deselected. New vlc_media was same size but too different for analysis with FC. Restarted VLC and now it finds the SD card! and asks whether to include its folders.

So I uninstalled and reinstalled VLC and this time answered yes to let it discover all folders. I think we got here the last time I stumbled on this bug: Refusing to let VLC detect all folders means it doesn't correctly detect the SD card.

PS—No, that's not the cause, problem persists even letting VLC initialization auto-detect.

[Aza]

Ok. But can you please share these files with me? (In private if you don't want to expose al of your medias).

[Spike1]

I backed down to final Nightly of 3.5.2 (2022-10-05) and it crapped out (deselecting almost all of the directories).

Backed down further to final Nightly of 3.5.1 (2022-09-14) and it is giving satisfaction.