I have been taking a careful look at synchronization across devices with Version 6.3.4.
The good new is that synchronization is clearly happening.
However, there are still some fairly severe problems.
In the examples below, I refer to the device where I actually post my changes as Device #1 and the device I am checking for synchronization results as Device #2
Problem #1
Shows that I have started watching recently are appearing on Device #2, but the episodes I have marked as watched on Device #1 still are not marked as watched on Device #2 days later.
Example #1:
I watched all 3 episode of AI Confidential days ago and marked them on Device #1. Device # 2 shows that I have started watching the show and have added it to a personal list, but the watched episodes are not marked as watched on Device #2.
Very oddly, on Device #2, the show has the Watched Status highlighted though no episodes are marked as watched. Also, it has not removed the show from the Watchlist.
One show - “FBI”, is listing more episodes than actually exist on Device #2. This may be caused by some sort of residual Trakt/TMDb inconsistency in the episode history for “FBI”, but I had thought there were no such problems for this show.
By far the most prevalent problem seems to be that synchronization across devices is happening, but there is no consistent pattern as to when they happen, and many items take far, far too long to be synchronized.
Thanks for the feedback. So it mostly happens for episodes/shows?
What happens when you try to pull refresh on the progress page (try to scroll up in the header so that the refresh icon appears).
Adding to other lists (movies, shows) doesn’t have that issue?
I have tried scrolling up on the Progress header many, many times. It always shows the spinning symbol very briefly but doesn’t seem to do anything. Nothing changes as far as I can tell. Forcing a sync just doesn’t seem to work.
Adding an item to a list seems to work better but not always. Also, when I start watching a new show, it appears in the Progress list on the secondary device reasonable quickly. It’s just that the episodes I mark as watched don’t get marked as watched on the target device. The show’s “Watched” indicator gets turned on even though the episodes themselves don’t get marked or placed in the episode watched history. Some, but not all, episodes eventually get marked after a long period of time. Sometimes the “Watchlist” indicator will be turned off when the show is added to the second device, but not always.
The synchronization process seem to be running in a reasonable amount of time on the secondary devices, but the syncing of episode watched information is working very poorly. I will note that this did work well on version 5, so it’s definitely a new problem with version 6.
As another example, yesterday I started watching a new show, “Scarpetta”. It had been on my Watchlist. I added it to my personal list “Active” and marked 6 episodes as watched. Today the show is listed on the secondary device’s Progress List, as it should be. The show’s “Watched” indicator is highlighted, but it says 0/8 episodes. Also, the show’s “watchlist” indicator is still highlighted. It should be off. The “Active” personal list item is not checked. It should be. None of the episodes I marked as watched on the primary device, is marked as watched on the secondary device.
I haven’t really been watching movies lately, but I’ll experiment with that and let you know soon.
So, the synchronization process is seriously degraded from version 5. This is something I use a lot, so I appreciate your looking into it.
OK, I marked a movie as watched and added it to my personal list “Movies Watched” After a short while, my secondary device shows the movie as watched, and it is listed in the movie watched history. However, the movie has not been removed from my watchlist on the secondary device, and so far it has not been added to my “Movies Watched” personal list on that device.
So synchronization is happening partially but not completely with movies either.
I’ve been checking since I received that release, but I really can’t see much difference at all. There are still a lot of problems. I haven’t yet identified any area in which synchronization is working better. Lot’s of episodes still are not marked as watched on the secondary devices when they should be, etc.
I expect that the changes I make on may phone are being posted to the database. They’re just not being synchronized to the other devices properly. At least that’s my guess. It looks like some things get through, but a lot don’t. Also, I have two secondary devices, and they don’t have exactly the same stuff missing. That inconsistency makes me think that the process of syncing the data from the database to other devices is broken. But I’m just guessing based on what I’m seeing. I could be wrong.
You have my ID, so you can do whatever you need to do to find the problem. If you need any more information from me, I’ll be glad to help any way I can.
Since the focus of the new version was on better synchronization between TMDb and Trakt, I’m guessing you made some fairly big changes to the synchronization process. So having problems there is not too surprising.
One thing I have been wondering about is this:
A lot of the updates that are missing on the secondary devices have been missing for a long time. If synchronization worked properly, would it pick up those differences and fix them, no matter how old the differences are? Or does the process expect that it would only need to handle more recent changes? It seems like it should handle them, no matter how old. Otherwise, a secondary device that is not running Moviebase for a long time before being connected would never get re-synced properly.
Thanks for your help! I am glad you helped me with all the edge cases. Especially multiple Samsung devices with many items.
The sync works incrementally, so it only fetches from a certain timestamp. It could happen that it never goes back in time. So I need to add another check or force a refresh. One interesting use case would be to reinstall the app to see if it fetches everything.
The entire deprecated Realm database (MongoDB) needed to be removed from the device, and also the entire sync has been rewritten from Java to Kotlin. The plan is to allow users to have a Trakt/Simkl and a Google account enabled at the same time.
OK, thank you for those insights. I don’t think I really have to reinstall the app. I can just delete it’s data and cache, and it’s like a fresh install. Then I have to sign back in and get my license working again, but I know how to do that. I’ll do that on one of my devices later today. But yes, I think the app should go back as far as it needs to, to keep things in sync. Like I said, a secondary device could go a long period without connecting to the app, but when it does, everything should sync.
Another approach would be to backup my data on the primary device and restore that data to a secondary device to get everything in sync and then go from there. For that to work properly, we need the “Clear previous items” option to really clear out the entire history on the target device. Have you fixed that yet? The last time I tried it the target history was not completely cleared. I could see that some old data for items that had been changed in TMDb was still there.
OK, that’s really what I expected. Thanks for that feedback.
Also, I’m glad to see that you’re switching to Kotlin. It seems like a nice improvement over Java.
Also, I just saw that you’re closing this forum and switching to 3 other discussion groups. It wasn’t clear to me which one of those would be used to report bugs/problem with the app. Do you intend for us to do that on the feature request one? You might want to be more clear about that in your announcement. I did see that is the intention when I signed up on featurebase, but it would be good to say that in the announcement. So open problems will not be moved there? We have to resubmit them all?
All new tickets, bugs, and requests should go over the featurebase board. We can keep the conversion here.
I will close the board in around 1 month and hope until there all the sync issues are fixed.
Yesterday I deleted all the Moviebase data (settings → apps → delete data) for one of my secondary devices, so it was like a newly installed app. I signed back in, set up my preferences and let the sync start from my database entries. I left it running overnight, but its status was the same this morning as when I went to bed. A lot worked very well. Almost all of my lists were restored there perfectly. All my personal lists, collections, hidden items, watchlist items, watched movie history and watched TV show history are perfect. There is only one thing wrong. There should be 33187 episodes in episodes watched history. The secondary device is stuck at having restored 20109 of the entries. Of course that makes my Progress show far too many shows also. I don’t know if it will ever change if I leave it longer, but it looks like it is permanently stuck with over13000 missing episodes watched history items.
After several days, something has changed. Did you change something on the back end?
I have been re-checking the phone that I reinitialized and let re-sync from the database, every day. It had remained stuck with over 10,000 watched episodes that were not properly updated. Today when I checked, the rest of the synchronization had finished. It was almost perfect. There was one season of one show that should have been marked watched that wasn’t. I corrected that and a small issue caused by TMDb recently deleting and re-adding some special episodes associated with “Alien Nation”. Now the two devices match perfectly. I will now be checking to see if my future updates sync to the secondary deice properly. I will also go through the app re-initialization process with my other secondary device and see what happens.
Please let me know if you have changed something that might have had this effect. I know there has not been a very recent new release of the app.
Weird that after five days or so, it decided to finish syncing my episode watch history on that device.
Yesterday I reinitialized my other secondary device and let it start syncing from the database. After running the rest of the day and overnight, most thing are synced. All my personal lists, collections, movie watch history and TV show history are correct. Most of my episode watch history synced, but it is still missing about 1500 episodes and so my progress list is also wrong. Also, none of my hidden items have shown up as hidden.
These are shows for which I have selected “Stop Watching”
So yes, when they are removed from Hidden Items, they show back up in the Progress List, where I do not want them.
And I think this issue is related to the other problem I reported, where Hidden Items disappeared on my primary device. And that just happened again. I think I have an insight into what is going on. Both times that my Hidden Items disappeared on my primary device, I had recently reinitialized one of my secondary devices and let it sync everything from the database. I think when I do that Moviebase basically syncs hidden items in the wrong direction. I think that instead of recognizing that my data has hidden items and placing them on the re-synced secondary devices, Moviebase sees that the secondary devices have no hidden items and then removes the hidden items from my primary device.
