vodmatic does its work in a queue. A background worker runs every minute, claims a batch, and processes it. Understanding the four states is most of understanding why something has or has not happened.
The states
| Pending | Queued and waiting its turn. Perfectly healthy. A first import puts thousands here. |
| Running | Being worked on right now. Usually one or two at a time. |
| Waiting | Blocked on something outside vodmatic's control and coming back on its own. Not a failure. The message says what it is waiting for. |
| Failed | Gave up after its attempts. This is the one worth looking at. |
Waiting is not failing
This is the distinction that matters most. A job in waiting is fine and will resolve itself. Common reasons:
- "That season is on the Needs attention list waiting for your decision." — answer the season and it moves.
- "The video file is still in the queue, so this is waiting rather than failing." — a subtitle that arrived before its episode. It will go in once the episode does.
- "This file waits its turn." — an episode of a series being built from season 1 upwards.
- "Ran out of metadata lookups for this run." — the budget for one pass. It carries on next minute.
None of these need anything from you except, in the first case, an answer on Needs attention.
Failed jobs
Open the failed list from the number on Status. Each row gives the file's path, what was tried, how many attempts it took, and the last error.
Read three or four before doing anything. A hundred failures are almost always one cause — the media server was unreachable for an hour, the licence lapsed over a weekend, a folder was renamed. Once you have fixed the cause, Queue all again puts every one of them back with its attempts reset.
Queuing them again before fixing the cause simply makes them fail again.
Scans
A scan walks a library folder and records what is there. It does not write to Ministra; it only finds files and queues the work. Scans run on a schedule you set under Settings, and you can start one by hand from the Library screen.
A scan finding nothing new is the normal, boring outcome.
Why a first import takes hours
Deliberately. Each file is looked up, matched, given artwork and written as several database rows, and the rate is capped so that a mistake in your settings does not fill your catalogue with forty thousand wrong entries before you notice. Leave it running. Progress is visible on Status the whole time.
Cancelling queued work
You can throw away everything queued of one kind — on the Activity screen in the panel, or from the Jobs screen in the app. Anything already running is left to finish: stopping a write halfway is how a half-made entry ends up in your catalogue. Nothing in Ministra is touched, and a later scan will queue whatever is still missing.
Pausing everything
Settings has a pause switch for the whole queue. Work still accumulates; it simply is not processed until you unpause. Useful while you are moving media around.
