Apple's Videos App on iPad won't load my shared library

Question

Hi,
I've been looking for an answer to this problem for ages!
Symptoms/context:
You have all your movies onto one big drive
You have uncheck Preferences|Advanced|"Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library"
(this way all titles will be linked to your big drive, not copied)
You have drag/drop those movies from your big drive in Finder into your iTunes Movies library
You have enabled Home Sharing (File|Home Sharing|Turn On Home Sharing)
You have disabled the old way of sharing (Preferences|Sharing tab|Uncheck "Share my library on my local network")
You have proudly added a very nice artwork for each of your movie so that you'll get nice thumbnails in iTunes
by using Identify.app
or by looking on the web for the best artwork (i.e. flickfacts.com), saving it locally, then drag/drop on your movie in iTunes (Get Info|Artwork)
You're using Apple's Videos app to load your shared library on you iPad
(Start Videos app,select your Shared library,wait a while,then all your thumbnails are displayed fine)
Then as the days go by, you realize that loading your library is taking more and more time, up until that day when all **** brakes loose and you get stuck at the small round clock progress bar, and you wait and wait but no thumbnails is coming up anymore. You reset everything to no avail. What happened?!!
Well here's what I had to do to fix that problem:
Everything is about movie thumbnails!
In my case I had an overhead of 0.5GB of thumbnails for 650 movies! That's an overhead alright! By overhead I mean that the sum of all my thumbnails was 500MB, so the Videos app had to load this (maybe not entirely at once but...) every time you start the app and select your shared library. This explain  why the app get slower and slower has you add new movies, thus new thumbnails/artworks.
But this doesn't really explain why ultimately the Videos app stops loading all of a sudden!
I realize the iTunes doesn't like:
Movie that doesn't show the correct icon preview in Finder
Invalid movie formats - I'll explain later
Big thumbnails
Read all 3 steps and don't forget the last paragraph at the end.
Movies that doesn't show the correct icon preview in Finder
Ultimately, I think that was the main problem of all my 3 steps
In Finder, enable the Icon Preview:
View|Show View Options|Check "Show Icon Preview"
You should now be able to see you thumbnails like this in Finder:
VALID:
INVALID:
But if you see any of these icons, the Videos app on the iPad might stumble a bit when loading the library
or
If that's the case for some of your movies, you'll have to make sure that ALL your movies have a proper thumbnail.This can be achieve:
by using Identify.app - see (note1)
or by looking on the web for the best artwork (i.e. flickfacts.com), saving it locally, then drag/drop on your movie in iTunes (Get Info|Artwork)
Once the thumbnail is corrected, it should display fine in Finder and iTunes
Invalid movie formats
There might be some cases where even after correcting the thumbnail in step 1., this icon still remains invalid.
If that's the case, you'll need to:
Either delete the movie altogether and rip it again
or reconvert it. For example with iSkySoft iMedia Converter Deluxe has a "Speed conversion" option that allows you to reconvert a 2.5GB movie in about 5 min. After the re-conversion I just had to do step 1. and all was fine, and the thumbnail would show well in Finder/iTunes.
Big thumbnails - may be optional
To speed up the loading of the movie library you have to reduce the size of the artwork that you insert into each of your movie's metadata:
Get the artwork on the web (i.e. flickfacts.com) and preferably a .jpg format,and save it locally
Open your movie file with Preview (Apple's preview app)
Tools | Adjust Size
Fit into: 640x480 pixels + OK
Save As (press Option before Saving) and save it in another folder (I called my folder "Reduced to 640x480")
Note: if you want to do this on a bunch of files at once: select all your files in Finder, right click and select Open. All you .jpgs will be opened in Preview. Then Ctrl-A to select all in Preview, then you can resize them all)
You'll noticed that a 1.5MB artwork can easily reduced as small as 50K-200K.
For example, I went from 500MB to 72MB for all my artworks. Much smallest overhead wouldn't you say?!
Now comes the part you'll all love : you need to remove ALL your old big artworks for ALL your iTunes movies:
in iTunes | Movies
Right click on a movie|Get Info|Artwork tab|Select the artwork|Delete
Drag/drop your newly reduced .jpg to that same window
Click OK to save.
You can't do that in batch, you have to do each manually like this (if anyone has a better idea, I'm all ears)
See (note1)
(note1) Important: If you use a program like Identify.app to retrieve the metadata/artwork, I'm pretty sure the size of the automatically retrieved artwork is quite big by default (around 1.5MB-2MB) so you might wanna be careful here and use it to retrieve the movie's metadata, but after that do step 3. to replace the artwork with a smaller one.
VERY IMPORTANT
Once step 1, 2 are completed (and I had already completed the optional step 3) you have to remove all movies from iTunes (see note, next sentence ) and drag/drop them all back from your drive to your iTunes Movies window. BEFORE REMOVING ALL MOVIES FROM iTUNES, make sure that the option (Preferences|Advanced|"Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library") was uncheck. If it was checked, I'm pretty sure it will delete all your movies on disk, not only in iTunes!!! - you'll have to investigate this yourselves or make sure you have a good backup copy of your movies first.
Since I've done all this, my iPad's Videos app is taking about 10-20 sec to load my over than 600 movies library
Pfew!!
Have fun gang,
Jean

Answer 1

This worked for me... A little time consuming but once you get rolling it goes GREAT... Thanks....
I got my artwork and saved it to my Desktop
Opened up Microsoft Paint and clicked on "File" and "Open" and found it to get it on the screen to resize it
Clicked "resize" and a box for changing it opened up
Checked the box "Pixels" and "Unchecked maintain aspect ratio"
Set Horizontal for 640 and Vertical for 480
Clicked on "OK" and went back to "File" and did a "Save As" and chose JPEG Picture
It came up "File Already Existed" and clicked "OK" (really did not care about the original artwork I found because wrong size)
Went to iTunes and on the movie right clicked on "Get Info", clicked on "Details", then "Artwork"
Go to the little box on the top left that shows your old artwork and click on it to get the little blue border to appear around it and hit "Delete" to make it gone
Click on "Add Artwork" and find it where you put the one from above on your Desktop and hit "Open" and OK and your new artwork is now there and all good.
Sounds like a lot of steps to follow but after around 5 or so you will fly through it. This worked perfect on my iPhone 6 Plus and I have artwork on my Home Videos now.