tinyMediaManager does not start from within the “Program Files” folder

First of all: tinyMediaManager is designed to be a portable application. This means that you can simply extract it to your preferred location (e.g. the users directory, or any other hard drive/network share). There is no need to install tinyMediaManager into C:\Program Files\.

If you still want to install tinyMediaManager to C:\Program Files\, you have to adopt permissions for this folder to run tinyMediaManager without Administrator (you should never run tinyMediaManager as Administrator - there is absolutely no need to do that):

Right click on the folder where you have installed tinyMediaManager (e.g. C:\Program Files\tinyMediaManager) and choose preferences. Go to the tab Security. In the list of all available users, choose Users (machine name\Users). In the area below the users list, activate all permissions.

tinyMediaManager.exe is reported to be a virus

The launcher from tinyMediaManager (tinyMediaManager.exe) is reported from several anti virus programs to be a virus. The launcher it self is written in Go and there is a FAQ from Go about this problem: https://golang.org/doc/faq#virus:

This is a common occurrence, especially on Windows machines, and is almost always a false positive. Commercial virus scanning programs are often confused by the structure of Go binaries, which they don’t see as often as those compiled from other languages.

In any case, if you believe the report is in error, please report a bug to the supplier of your virus scanner. Maybe in time virus scanners can learn to understand Go programs.

tinyMediaManager can’t connect to the internet via NTLM proxy

NTLM authentication does not work within tinyMediaManager. You can use something like CNTLM to connect to the internet.

tinyMediaManager won’t start with Java Portable

Java Portable provides Java in a different way than the installed one. You may need to create a batch file (.bat) inside the tinyMediaManager folder with the following content (including the dot at the end!):

cd %~dp0
<path to PortableApps>\CommonFiles\Java\bin\javaw.exe -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -Dsilent=noupdate -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -jar getdown.jar .

replace <path to PortableApps> with the installation path of your PortableApps.

tinyMediaManager v4 ships its own Java, so this is not needed any more

tinyMediaManager does not respect UI scaling settings from the system

Every Java version/Operating System does handle high DPI/UI scaling differently, but you can force tinyMediaManager to pick up your preferred scaling factor:

  1. Navigate to the content folder of tinyMediaManger: Just use the action “Tools -> Open data folder” and you file manager will open. Just navigate to one folder above this data folder (this usually contains several folders like data, logs, backup, cache). You can also navigate manually to this folder:
    • If you have a portable installation, the content folder is also the tinyMediaManager folder
    • C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\tinyMediaManager
  2. open (or create if it does not exist) the file launcher-extra.yml in content folder of tinyMediaManager.
  3. add (or modify) the following part in this file: 
    jvmOpts:
- "-Dsun.java2d.uiScale=2"

    where 2 is the scaling factor you want to use.

  4. relaunch tinyMediaManager

v4: The file launcher-extra.yml is in the tinyMediaManager folder

v3: Java 8: follow the steps from this thread.
Java 9+: either do the same as for Java 8 or create a file called extra.txt in the tinyMediaManager install directory and add the following line -Dsun.java2d.uiScale=2. Last but not least you could try to increase the font size in the general settings and restart tinyMediaManager

UI glitches

tinyMediaManager on Windows (locally or with a remote desktop connection software like RDP or VNC) can produce some weird glitches due an unresolved issue of Java (in combination with some graphics drivers). You can turn off the direct3D rendering pipeline to avoid these glitches:

  1. Navigate to the content folder of tinyMediaManger: Just use the action “Tools -> Open data folder” and you file manager will open. Just navigate to one folder above this data folder (this usually contains several folders like data, logs, backup, cache). You can also navigate manually to this folder:
    • If you have a portable installation, the content folder is also the tinyMediaManager folder
    • C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\tinyMediaManager
  2. open (or create if it does not exist) the file launcher-extra.yml in content folder of tinyMediaManager.
  3. add (or modify) the following part in this file: 
    jvmOpts:
- "-Dsun.java2d.d3d=false"
- "-Dsun.java2d.nodraw=true"
  4. relaunch tinyMediaManager

v4: The file launcher-extra.yml is in the tinyMediaManager folder

v3: You can create (or edit if it already exists) a file called extra.txt in the tinyMediaManager install directory and add the following lines -Dsun.java2d.d3d=false and -Dsun.java2d.nodraw=true

Getting many TLS/SSL errors - PKIX certificate chain validation failed

This usually happens, when a SSL certificate of a contacted site has expired.
But another prominent reason could be some corporate/enterprise SSL inspection, where the certificate chain gets broken up, and re-signed by some proxy server. This is common for companies, which roll out their own root certificate to your machine.

Since Java does not read that per default, you could change that behaviour within launcher-extra.yml (see above where this file is stored)

jvmOpts:
- "-Djavax.net.ssl.trustStoreType=WINDOWS-ROOT"

Setting that delegates Java to use the Windows internal certificate store, which might have the missing one to validate your requests.

Unable to launch tinyMediaManager from a path containing unicode characters

The Java runtime has some problems starting from a unicode path - this is a historical issue on Windows. But starting with Windows release 1903 onwards (Windows 11 and Windows 10 from patch 1903 / May 2019) we are able to force the tinyMediaManager process to use unicode paths for the Java runtime.

If you are using an older version of Windows, you need to move the tinyMediaManager installation to a path without containing any unicode (only ASCII) characters.