I am wanting to remove the meta data artwork from showing up under “Picutres”. I am not sure that this is actually doable, but I have finally setup my SMP to display pictures as the screen saver and half of the pictures it pulls are album artwork or movie artwork that I would like for the SMP to ignore. Is it possible to hide these so they do not get displayed under the “Pictures” tab but are displayed when viewing the movies?
They shouldn’t be displaying under Pictures. Cover Arts are “.metathumb” files which aren’t considered photos. And “Backdrop” photos, while JPGs, are in hidden folders, thus won’t show in pictures, either.
If you’re using JPG files as cover art, well, then what you’re seeing is correct behavior.
I’m using thumbgen to create the jpg files so I guess it is doing what it is supposed to do, but not what I want it to do.
Can I make the jpg files hidden so they don’t show up under pictures and still have them show up as the artwork?
No, you’ll need to rename all the files to .metathumb extension instead of .jpg
I don’t use thumbgen, but I thought it had an option to save covers with the .metathumb extension?
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Yes thats correct Tony
Its in Options > Input Output Naming
Click on .jpg the drop down dialog opens where you can select .metathumb
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I can make those changes quite easily and will post back what I find out.
I do know that some of the files are .png will that make a difference?
Hmm. I’m not sure about that. Give it a try and let us know. :)
Hmm, i thought *.png was not supported on the SMP (definatlely not Alpha Transparency) but otherwise if it does …
it’s gonna crush the picture quality (because it gets cached)… just a pretty sure ‘guess’ 
Yeah, except for transparency, PNGs do work. I have a few “folder.png” files still hanging out for legacy reasons, and they work fine in the stock themes…
Thanks, Tony
What’s the Picture Quality and Picture Compression like ? same as Jpg’s ?
if they are the same … then what’s the advantage ? and why use them ?
Png are larger in filesize (due to less compression and other “what not’s”)
The PQ is fine… same as JPGs as far as I can tell. The ONLY advantage I was seeing at the time was when I had both Boxee Box and WDTV using the same content sources.
Boxee has quite different requirements on file organization than the WDTV, and the Boxees ignored PNG files. So I used PNGs to keep the WDTV cover art working correctly with the WDTVs without screwing up how the Boxee presented covers.
This was a long time ago (Let’s see; Boxee came out in November 2010? … and I returned it back to Amazon two months later.) – just never went back and cleaned out the flotsam.
TonyPh12345 wrote:
The PQ is fine… same as JPGs as far as I can tell.
OK, cool 
(so, if someone buys a WDTV unit and has never previously owned a Boxee Box … then Jpg will suffice [and use less file space] )
It appears that my xbmc does not l Ike the metathumb extension. I’m still testing it out but the iPad app for xbmc did not show the artwork for the videos.
The SMP does not understand hidden files so it still shows those unfortunately. However the metathumb extension works great, I just wish it would work with XBMC also.
bbenz3 wrote:
It appears that my xbmc does not l Ike the metathumb extension. I’m still testing it out but the iPad app for xbmc did not show the artwork for the videos.
You never mentioned about XBMC in your original post
So, off topic to XBMC … of course XBMC won’t recognise " .metathumb"
XBMC uses “.tbn” for poster thumbnails (which the WDTV SMP/HUB won’t recognise)
So you can have both with your media and they will display depending on the device you’re using (SMP/XBMC)
The Dark Knight Rises.mkv
The Dark Knight Rises.xml
The Dark Knight Rises.metathumb (will display on the SMP but not XBMC)
The Dark Knight Rises.tbn (will display on XBMC but not SMP)
Now, thumbgen doesent support / output “.tbn” … so make a copy of all your .metathumbs and batch rename the file extension to .tbn
(create a notepad document, inside it type ren *.metathumb *.tbn then save the document and rename the file extension to .bat now copy this inside the folder of your copied .metathumbs and double-click it … will rename all the .metathumbs to .tbn in a few seconds)
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Thanks for the additional info. I did similar using a rename utility and my sync utils to perform my tests.
So I ended up just creating two profiles in thumbgen, one for .tbn and one for .metathumb. I have to run it twice to make everything which isn’t ideal but it seems to work well. Thanks for all the help.
