Refreshing thumbnails

Even if I change the image associated with a movie, the WDTV keeps showing the old image. I have deleted the .wdtv hidden folder on my hard disk, but nothing changes. I have deactivated the media library, nothing. Reading the forum it seems like I should do a reset of the SMP. If I do that, will I have to re-enter my 24 characters password to the router/modem?

After you deleted the .wdtv folder did you then “Power Cycle”  ie. Completely switch off the device then reboot ?

Also try clearing the media library as well (this will refresh the database)

Setup > System > Media Library > Clear Media Library

 

Do not do a Device Reset ! it is Not necessary …

as you are aware it will be a pain in the “you know what” :wink:  to reconfigure the entire device again… just for a thumbnail change !

Hi! Thanks for answering! I did the clear media library, to no avail. What exactly do you mean by reboot? it’s just doing power off and power on on the remote? If it is, I did it.

JoeySmyth wrote:

Do not do a Device Reset ! it is Not necessary …

as you are aware it will be a pain in the “you know what” :wink:  to reconfigure the entire device again… just for a thumbnail change !

I, know, that’s why I’m asking :wink:. But the whole thumbnails thing is becoming “that”…

Power OFF … Unplug from the Mains Power … Wait 30-60 Seconds … Plug the Power Back In

ie. " Power Cycle" 

 

If it still doesent work, post a screenshot of the file/folder structure (upload it here … click your profile / images) 

(blank out any personal details you don’t want the world to see)  … I’ll approve straight away for viewing

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Also, remember that the WDTV has 2 power off states. If you just power off, it is in standby mode and it really isn’t completely off. You need to hold down the power button at least 7 to 10 seconds for it to completely turn off. I hold down my power button uintil the light is off, then I let go of the power button.

The standby power off / complete power off is always a hot topic and it was a design choice WD made a long time ago, ever since the 1st WDTV Gen 1 was release / sold, which I have. 

People sometimes plug the WDTV into a power strip or power cord with a on/off switch and use that switch in addition to powering off the WDTV box. I use this method, but I always hold down my power button until the light goes off too. If you use a lan/network cable connected to the WDTV, you could also see the lan cable light go off too to make sure the power is completely off. 

I got use to holding down the power button, but others seem to be put off by this. 

Sometimes I do use the standby power mode if I want the box to be ready to turn on in 30 or so minutes later, but most of the time I usually just power it on and let it be on until I’m ready to use it.

It’s like turning on a computer and leaving to do something else, then when you come back to it after a few minutes, it’s ready to use.

I feel it’s the price I have to pay for have this device that no other device can compete with as far as cost, useability, and customization options.

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More details are needed:  You are using Media Library?  Where are your video files and how is the SMP accessing them?

If you are using ML, and have your files on a WIndows share on a PC, then you can certainly get the thumbs to update by: (1) powering down the SMP (pull power cord), (2) deleting the .wd_tv directories from all shares, (3) powering your SMP back up and letting it rebuild the ML and .wd_tv directories.  I have to do this occasionally when I change thumbs and want the changes to appear immediately.

If you say the old thumbs are still being shown after doing the above, then something is very wrong.  Where exactly could the old (supposedly now deleted from the shares) thumbs possibly be coming from?  This implies to me that you really haven’t changed the thumb.  How exactly are you changing a movie’s thumbnail?  The thumbnail for Movie.mkv, for example, is Movie.metathumb.

If you are not using the “Movie.metathumb” filename method, “Movie.jpg” works fine too. I use that for all of my movie thumbnails without any problems. I prefer it, because it is more logical and unstandable for me. A JPEG file should be named with a “.jpg” filename extension. I don’t know why they changed this. WDTV Gen 1 used the “Movie.jpg” filename method.

For folder thumbnails, I use something like this “!.methathumb”. This forces WDTV to read it as the 1st filename in the folder. I also have a copy of the same file and its named “Folder.jpg”. This way I can quickly review what it looks like through windows explorer window or a image program, like Google’s Picasso photo viewer. My thumbnails of 120x180 show up fast and fine. The largest thumbnail images I use go up to 333x500 if I have a lot of detail, like smaller printed words, but usually I use the 120x180 size.

I did the Power Cycle. Still the wdtv keeps showing the old images.

The films are on a hard disk connected to the wdtv by usb. I had already cleared the library and deactivated it. Then I reactivated the media library: nothing changes.

This is the structure:

I have the problem with this persistence of old thumbnails in the grid view. Every time I have deleted the .wdtv folder. Thus I’m not replacing the thumbs created by the WDTV but rather changing the movie.jpg (in this case the Abel.Gance.1941.Vénus.aveugle.jpg ). If I change the movie and image name just adding a word, the thumbnails is always the same. If I change completely the name to aaazzz.avi and aaazzz.jpg, only then it shows the new image.

I’ve read in old messages in the forum that the wdtv stores thumbnails in a tmp\cache folder?

At last I found the solution, which I share even if mine was a bit particular as situation:

I should explain better what I did before. When I connected the first time my hard disk to the wdtv, and saw how it squeezed the images to make them fit in 2x3 vertical box, regardles of their real proportion, I created new images, from the old ones, but with a bigger canvas, to maintain the 2x3 proportion, using the freeware mogrify (ImageMagick).

Since they were still a bit squeezed because the wdtv interface expected a 16:9 monitor and mine was an old 4:3, I got better results with 2x3.6  images. But not for all the movies, in many cases I still got the old images.

At last, I have discovered that the wdtv was reading the previews saved inside some of the jpeg (Photoshop does that, for ex.) , preview that was copied from my old files to the new images. By cleaning these previews I got rid of the problem.

I had a similar problem, and it was fixed by doing the power-cycle of the WD SMP (hard power off and reboot).  I did not need to delete the .wdtv folder or do a manual rebuild the media library.  Merely rebuilding the media library without a reboot does NOT refresh the thumbnails.

However my experience has revealed another SMP coding oddity.  I had a folder with 15 video folders in it.  As a test, I created a thumbnail for the first file.  It worked straight away (no reboot), and it was used as the thumbnail for both the first video file, and the folder overall.

What’s odd is that when I added all the other thumbnails, they did not show up until I did the reboot.  So WD SMP is coded to think that once the FIRST thumbnail appears in a folder, it won’t automatically scan for thumbnails in that folder ever again, even if thumbnails were missing for some of the files.  If you add more thumbnails later, or even overwrite previous thumbnails with new ones, it doesn’t rescan the folder, it just ignores them.

So the lesson is - add all thumbnails to a folder in ONE GO, before you browse that folder on SMP.  Don’t add them one at a time unless you want to reboot the device every time you add new thumbnails to that folder.