No thumbs for episodes

[wilderness]

Hi all

Just reinstalled 3.5.1 and now for some reason when i scrape my library i get no thumbs for episode just the fanart ??

any clues or help very gladly received

(edit) oh yes i did scrape my shows with Media companion on my PC before doing a clean reinstall 3.5.1 dont know if this can cause problems or not as every episode has it own thumb as a jpg.

[wilderness]

OK

I have a 1.4 64mb xbox With flashed tsop (ind bios) and 250gb HD

this is what i have now done and still have the problem

first

on the XBOX

Put fresh ext2 formated 250gb Maxtor IDE drive in
use AID 4.51 to do a mod chip install, which installs XBMC 9.04-alpha1 r19198 to drive E

then whilst AID is still active

on the PC

FTP'd XBMC4XBOX-3.5.1 to drive G:
Scanned All my TV Shows with Media Companion


back to XBOX

restart xbox boot into XBMC
goto APPS and Launch DVD2XBOX
use filemanager to delete contents of

E:/XBMC
E:/UDATA
E:/TDATA

move XBMC folder from G: to E:/XBMC

reboot xbox

boots into clean install of 3.5.1

add samba share with tv shows scan then go into Library view set to display media info, i have fanart
and all other data about shows go into any of the folders still have fanart etc but still no thumb
for episodes, This is starting to drive me a little loopy please someone help.

(edit) When i try and refresh individual episodes it tells me there is info stored locally and ask if i want to ignore it if i do still no thumb
I can add the thumbs manually then i have to rescan for media for it to show up, I really dont want to do this for nearly 5000 episodes

[wilderness]

Well if anyone is interested it looks like the problem is caused by the thumbs etc created by media companion if the thumbs are in the same folder as the episodes you end up with no thumbs in your library take them out and rescan everything is fine is there anything i can do with these thumbs so that X4X will use them ??

[Dan Dar3]

Give us an example of a folder, files int the folder and the .tbn files generated.

This is the wiki page for XBMC4Xbox thumbs - doesn't seem to cover well the episodes tbns nor the case that you presented, but maybe once we know more about it we can find out what's going on.
http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/wiki/Thumbn ... Thumbnails

[wilderness]

Ok

here is 1 of my folders

Another Period
.actors
Chritina_hendricks.jpg
Jason_ritter.jpg
etc etc

Season 1
folder.jpg
Another Period.S01E01.Pilot.mp4
Another Period.S01E01.Pilot-thumb.jpg
Another Period.S01E01.Pilot.nfo

etc till end of show

banner.jpg
fanart.jpg
folder.jpg
poster.jpg
season01-banner.jpg
season01-poster.jpg
tvshow.nfo

i hope its not just as simple as rename the jpg to tbn as i will then feel more than a little stoopid

[wilderness]

ok so renaming all the jpg's to tbn gives nice thumbs in non library mode and when you scan to library you have thumbs for episodes but no fanart or season thumbs so now will try and rename all folder.tbn and fanart.tbn backto jpg and see what happens thank goodness for metamorphose

[Dan Dar3]

May only need to go Media Companion > General Preferences > Artwork Version > Pre-Frodo (default) - select that > Apply changes.

[wilderness]

ok renamed the folder.tbn and fanart.tbn back to jpg and everything is hunk dorey again i think i wll have to delete all the thumbs nfo etc first to retry with media companion will try again later and leave my findings (oooohhhhh listen to him all sleuth like )

[wilderness]

Well that took a lot longer than expected but everything is wonderfully well organized now
using the pre frodo option works a treat.

So now for a couple of questions

1. when you go through the TV shows it of course now shows the thumbs and fanart do these then get stored anywhere in xbmc4xbox or does it just read them from the disk ??

2. If the thumbs and fanart are not added anywhere is there a skin that will show the NFO thumb and fanart without having to add to the database thus saving space ?

[Dan Dar3]

Very good, glad to hear

To understand a bit the process and that might answer both your questions - the "scan" process takes normally media information and artwork (thumbs, fanart etc) from Internet websites and obviously that takes long time to do every time so it caches the information in a local database (Q:\UserData\Databases\MyVideo34.db) and the artwork into local thumbnail files (q:\UserData\Thumbnails). Same happens when the information it retrieved from the local NFOs and artwork files, it is stored in the database and thumbnails folders - this is just a workaround to address scan performance, slow internet or even lack of internet altogether.

[wilderness]

Ok thanks

So silly question time

as i now have fanart etc in each of the relevant folders is it possible to turn off the adding to the database and just let it read from the disk each time or is this just 2 slow ?

is it possible to mod xbmc4xbox easily to read jpg instead of tbn so that other software can show the thumbs ?

is it then possible to trick xbmc4xbox to be in library mode so that it reads the nfo thumbs and fanart etc. from the source directory instead of the database

or is this just going to make everything to slow.

these questions have probably been asked before and if they have sorry to waste your time.

Oh yes and your xbmc4xbox remote app is awesome so thanks for that

[Dan Dar3]

To be honest, I'm not sure I am the right person to give authoritative answers on this subject, but I think most of the rules and filename conventions are hardcoded in the application. I think the scan and gathering the information to store in a known location was done to optimize the experience, looking up the files everytime where the content is (could be a network share, ftp etc) would be laggy.

There is a certain small amount of adjustments you can do with say thumbsize and fanart filenames, but that's about it - see advancedsettings.xml which you can create with just the sections you want to alter. http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/wiki/UserDa ... ttings.xml

You can ask away, some of these questions may have been asked, although be honest it would help a little more to go into detail as to exactly what would like to achieve with each change to get a better understanding and someone if not me to give you the best answer.

PS: Thank you, good news is that I am back on working on the next version that hope to release sometime in the next month or so.