I don't remember how many years MCM has been sluggish and crashing for me now. After some experiments, I believe the issue is caused by
inaccessible/offline network file paths in the XML files. I wanted to share what I did to work around this issue and now my MCM is working flawlessly now. It's fast with no more lockups or crashes. I wanted to share this with others to see if they can replicate what worked for me.
How I fix Movies:Manually edit movie.xml files and remove lines containing invalid paths. For my case, I only noticed these paths in the metadata LocalTrailer. I used a script to search through all my movie.xml files and removed the entire entry <LocalTrailer>*</LocalTrailer>
Code:
<LocalTrailer>
<URL>\\HPEX495\Movies\Comic Book Movies\Avengers Age of Ultron (2015) 1080p WEB-DL DD5.1\Avengers.Age.of.Ultron.2015.1080p-trailer.mp4</URL>
<Type>1</Type>
</LocalTrailer>
How to fix my TV Shows:For TV shows, all I did was delete the existing hidden metadata folders created in each TV series Season folder. The metadata folders contain xml files and images that I suspect could have invalid or inaccessible paths.
E:\MediaShare\TV Shows\Ancient Impossible (2014)\Season 1\metadata
E:\MediaShare\TV Shows\Young Sheldon (2017)\Season 01\metadata
E:\MediaShare\TV Shows\Young Sheldon (2017)\Season 02\metadata
Additionally, I fixed the file names of my TV show episodes so that they all contain the shortened season/episode "SXXEXX". For example "Young.Sheldon - S01E02.mp4"
After performing these steps, I relaunch MCM and it no longer crashes. I am able to perform the following and the media list refresh actually completes quickly each time.
1) Clear cache and perform full media list refresh SHIFT+F5
2) Media list refresh (full/complete) CTRL+ F5
3) Media list refresh (quick/incomplete) F5
