Can't search videos

[Ao1Pointblank]

I have auto-organization off, and have allowed the app access to my Camera folder which contains all my photos and about 28GB of mp4 videos.

I try to refresh the video index manually from settings, and I see the android notification flash up that it is working on it, but as soon as I go back to the main page, it alerts me I need to go back and index again.

My question is:

Do I need auto organization on for this feature?
Does it need a lot more time to process so much content?
If so, the status notification needs to reflect the process and hopefully it can run in the background when I switch to the app's main screen or close the app.

I should also mention I am running this on an Android 14 Pixel 5 which is usually plenty fast, at least for image indexing (~10GB images on my phone)

[dev-diaries41]

How much time did you actually wait for it to start indexing?

The fact that you got the notification indicates everything is fine and working as expected. One you start indexing do not do anything else just wait, even if you see the same alert telling you to index - just click cancel if you already started indexing previously.

I have an idea of what could have caused the alert popping up again but to confirm let me know what happens when you try the above.

Auto-organisation has nothing to do with this.

[Ao1Pointblank]

I just left it running for 40 minutes with Caffeine keeping my screen on during a manual refresh, no change

[dev-diaries41]

Likely your videos are in an unsupported encoding format, so they’re skipped during indexing. That would explain why your video index is empty and you see constantly see the alert. To confirm, could you share the source of your videos (camera, laptop copy, downloaded, etc.)? As a quick test, try recording a short video directly on the device and refresh the video index. If that one appears, it confirms the encoding issue, since camera recorded videos should always be supported.

[Ao1Pointblank]

Still no support for videos recorded on my phone, a Pixel 5 with GrapheneOS.
Camera app in use is the containerized Google Camera, recording in H.265/HEVC encoding.
91 videos to index, approximately 16GB.

[dev-diaries41]

recording in H.265/HEVC encoding

This is most likely the issue. Frame extraction with Androids's MediaMetadataRetriever can fail for some H.265/HEVC videos, especially depending on device.

The only solution would be to use a third-party library instead of Android's built-in MediaMetadataRetriever, which i don't currently plan on doing because it would increase app size too much, and that tradeoff isn’t worth it since most users haven’t reported facing this problem.