Although I have the WDTV live SMB, I think that this is the main themes area?
I am fairly happy with the standard Mochi theme for my tv shows. Just one bugbear… Most episode icons on the meta site are widescreen so the portrait spots are populated with tiny windscreen icons that aren’t big enough to be useful.
Does anyone know of a theme that’s similar to Mochi, but has say, 5 thumbnails at the bottom of screen in a landscape layout? In other words I don’t want the black letterbox effect on the thumbnails.
I’ve never seen this issue with any of my tv shows
but then all my stuff is relatively main screen so getting a pic of a dvd cover etc to use as a thumbnail is always easy, and that’s what thumbgen has always found by default in my case
… Most episode icons on the meta site are widescreen so the portrait spots are populated with tiny windscreen icons that aren’t big enough to be useful.
Agree with KAD, you have something odd going on with your setup / template in Thumbgen if that is the program you are using, or for that matter whichever program you are using. Your thumbnails for TV shows (and movies) should not be in landscape. The should be JPGs that are rectangular in portrait layout.
I do not use Mochi, but I switched to it to show the below pictures, one in Gallery View and the other in 3x3 Icons. As I have not created XMLs (I use linksheets instead), the Gallery View below does not have any metadata that would in theory be there if I were building my sheets for Mochi, but you should still get the idea of what the shape of the icons should be. These specific TV show JPGs were created for Simplicity, so Mochi just takes my JPGs and puts them into the sizing format that is coded for the theme.
Question: Is it possible that you are generating a movie sheet, and then by mistake using it as the cover art? Movie sheets would be in landscape.
When you create a cover, (episoodename.jpg) and open it up on your computer, it should look something like one of the pictures below . For reference, I am showing you a folder.jpg for a TV Series, a folder.jpg for a Season, and and episodename.jpg for a specific episode of the TV Series. You should be able to simply double click on the jpg on your computer and have it come up as something that looks similar to one of these three. It will not be exact as I have made these using the Simplicity Template in Thumbgen.
If when you open the any of these show JPGs on your computer in a viewer or graphic editor, and they are in landscape and have a lot of room at the top and bottom, good chance you are mistakenly using the backdrop or movie sheet as your Episode Icon, and thus the theme is attempting to jam a “1280 x720” picture into a “240 x 364” frame.
Sorry I wasn’t clear enough. I really appreciate the advice you guys gave but I don’t use thumbgen. My icons are retrieved by either Sickbeard or the WD media library metadata fetch.
I went to the meta site itself and its episode icons are landscape, so that’s what is being placed in the portrait placeholder making the image too small in consequence. All the Show Folder icons are fine, its just once in a show the episode icons are too small. If they were displayed in a landscape placeholder they would be fine.
I was hoping there was a same-as-stock-standard Mochi theme with the exception that wen in a show folder there is not seven portrait icons but rather 4 or 5 landscape ones.
I have it largely automated with Sickbeard so I don’t want to do any manual processing with thumbgen etc.
