Darklight/Mojo SMP Thumbgen Theme Problem

Hi, Im new to the forum and have had a WD TVLive SMP for around a year and decided to change the theme to one of the above (Mojo/Darklight) to give it a facelift.

Firstly I would like to thank Tinwarble for his most excellent themes (got to say I prefer the look of Mojo), the time and effort he has put into creating these is much appreciated.

I have installed both Darklight and Mojo via the webpage upload and both have installed without any problems.  I followed the instructions on the forum for installing/downloading the themes/templates and thumbgen.  I have followed all the instructions for setting up moviesheets (to the letter) but have a few small problems.  I have tried to figure them out myself but to no avail so thought it best to ask for some help.

Problem 1:

I have run through a few of the movie files I have on the computer (mostly avi/mp4 files).  I have the movies situated in genre folders (Family/SciFi/Horror) and have found that some of the movies have cover pictures but no movie info and some have movie info and no cover pictures.  I cant for the life of me see what is wrong.  I have checked the XML documents which are created by Thumbgen and these have the movie info in them.    To complicate things a bit more - I ran through a few of my Tv Program folders and these showed up perfectly with both Cover picture and movie info.  I must be doing something wrong withing Thumgen or is it a problem with Mojo/Darklight or even my settings on my TVLive SMP.

(the folder setup for movies is as follows

E:\Movies"genre"\

the folder setup for tv programs is:

E:\TV Programs"tv program name""Season number")

Problem 2

I have downloaded the recommended cover pictures for the genre from this website.  I have tried copying them and pasting them into the individual genre folder and renaming them to folder.jpg.  This hasnt worked.  I have tried renaming them to the genre_sheet.jpg (i.e SciFi_sheet.jpg).  This didnt work (at least not on all of the folders but did work on others i.e. would work on Superhero Movies but not on SciFi, works on the Drama folder, but not on the Horror etc).  I have scoured the forums on here to try and find a solution and have tried all I can find - Am i doing something wrong - I read somewhere that it takes the first (in alphabetical order) picture in the folder and sets that as the cover picture - is this correct - and if so if I change the name to the first letter of the alphabet (i.e a.jpg) would this put that picture as the cover picture for the folder?

My setup at home is the WD TVLive SMP (Gen 2 i think although may be Gen 3 - was purchased Feb 2011) updated to the latest firmware connected to a Sky Broadband hub and then connected onto my computer.  I have 3 drives in my PC for storage - “C:” as my main drive for windows/downloads etc “D:” as storage drive 1 (mainly for tv programs) and “E:” as storage drive 2 (Split into two folders Movies/TV Programs). Running Windows 7 64bit.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

  1. First thing I would do is doublecheck you are gallery view as this is the only one that will display the moviesheet

  2. then I would check that in TG you are generating Moviesheets with the hub xml and TVsheets with the hub(new firmware) xml

  3. Then I would make sure that your folder do not contain a mixture of metathumb and jpg images. metathumb overrides all jpg

  4. If all above is set correctly and still not working, delete the “.wd_tv\thumb” folder [hidden] and “.miocrawler_cache” folder [hidden]. (I hope these folders exist on SMP)

  5. make sure autoscan is set to off or manual in settings [doing this by memory and dont remember the exact details]

  6. remove power cord for 5 seconds and re-insert.

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Hi Drizzt09, thanks for the reply.

1.Yes - in gallery view

  1. Yes I am generating moviesheets with the .xml extension and tvsheets with the .xml extension

  2. I have found some metathumb files in certain folders and these seem to be the only ones which actually show the cover pictures for the movie folders correctly and provide the movie info - the folders which dont have the metathumb in arnt showing the movie info even though the movie info is present in the xml file.

  3.  Dont think these files exist as I can see all hidden folders on my pc and cant see them on the hard drive im using for storing my videos.

  4.  My autoscan is set to auto - and updates hourly.  I will switch this off when I get home if it interfers with the thumbgen files created.  

  5.  I have been doing this regularly over the last few days whilst trying to sort it.

Do the metathumb files need to be deleted from all the folders?

  1. Yes I am generating moviesheets with the .xml extension and tvsheets with the .xml extension
  • in TG beside the dropdown for .xml is another dropdown. make sure this option in TG beside .xml is set to “WDTV Hub” for movies, and “WDTV Hub(new FW)” for TV.
  1. I have found some metathumb files in certain folders and these seem to be the only ones which actually show the cover pictures for the movie folders correctly and provide the movie info - the folders which dont have the metathumb in arnt showing the movie info even though the movie info is present in the xml file.
  • it is best practice to have either metathumb OR jpg. Not a mixture of both. This option can be changed in TG. The WDTV Hub/SMP when using internal scraper uses metathumb. Hence why I said turn off the autoscan as it may scan and create metathumbs for anything missing info.(If I am understanding the logic behind the auto scanner correctly)
  1.  Dont think these files exist as I can see all hidden folders on my pc and cant see them on the hard drive im using for storing my videos.
  • the hidden folders may be placed on the SMP internal small storage or may be inside each genre folder. They have to be somewhere. I can’t see the SMP having different setup than the Hub.

Any of these changes may need the power reboot after to clear out

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Thanks again for the help Drizzt09

I didnt change the settings box to “new fw” for the tv shows - ill have a try with that option when i get home.

I will also go through and delete all the everything from the folders apart from the actual films/tv shows and start from scratch without the autoscan turned on.  That way It wont create any metathumbs, and should just created the jpg and xml files in the folders.folders.

I’ll have a better look to see if I can find those hidden files and delete them if i can find them.

Ill come back to you and let you know the outcome.

Thanks again.

Well seems like all is sorted.

Firstly I turned the auto update cover info to “Manual” on the HDTVLive settings.

I went through the whole of the movies folders and deleted all bar the movies themselves (withing their respective genre folders).  Copied the thumbs provided for folders into their respective folders and renamed them “folder”.  I renamed all the movie files to their correct title and got rid of anything else not needed in title (i.e date etc).  I followed the Thumbgen tutorial all the way through and ran it for my smalles genre folder (which just so happened to be Drama).  All files were created apart from the cover icon for each of the movies.  So again went back through the tutorial - what i discovered was that the cover picture for the movie was being created with the title “moviename_thumb”.  This was one of the settings which was changed within the thumbgen options screen.  So quickly changed it back and deleted the “_thumb” files that had been created.  For some reason the folder also created a thumb for the folder called “Drama_Sheet.jpg” which then showed up as the cover pic for the folder.  I deleted this as well as couldnt see how to stop it being generated withing Thumbgen.  Unplugged the HDTVLive box for 5 sec, rebooted and away we went - cover pics working perfectly with the movie info showing and the folder covers working.

All looked fine so ran through a few more genre folders to check, these also looked good (although still had to delete the “genre_sheet.jpg” out of each folder after id finished with the folder.  If anyone knows how to stop this file being generated please can you let me know.

Just got to run through my massive tv programs collection deleting everything bar the programs themselves (think its gonna take most of Sat morning - may even re-organise the folders whilst im at it) and run thumbgen again (which could take a while).

Thanks for all the help Drizzt09

in TG options > General

on the right side… list off the ones that are checked

in TG options > Input/output naming

list what is selected for the ones checked in the previous window.

Well - being going at it since 8AM yesterday morning (on & off) and still havent finished - done Hard Drive “D” and now working through Hard Drive “E”.  Would have been finished by now but for one problem I found after completing all of Hard Drive “D”.  I unplugged the HDTVLive box and restarted it so it would pic up all the new pics etc.  Folder covers for the individual TV Programs working fine, Season covers working fine, Episode covers working fine, the only problem that I have is that all the “Movieinfo” for the episodes is missing as well as the title, episode number etc.  I have figured out what the problem is after checking the XML file - they were missing - only the actual Series info was present as the Overview, no plot, episode number, title on the XML file.  So after deleting all the XML files from my “D” drive again I ran through the first tv show on there in manual mode to check if the information was coming up in Thumbgen in the movieinfo box.   Yep indeedy - it was there.  So once that series was finished I checked the XML files and all the info was there - rebooted the HDTVLive box and checked it and hey presto it was perfect - all info and folder covers showing up great.  So - I though I must have clicked something wrong the first time round - so picked the next series and ran it Semi-Automatic - checked the movieinfo box and yes all info there - checked the xml files - yes all info there. So thought I would take a chance on running Automatic mode for the next show - FAIL - for some reason when running on either Automatic or I Feel Lucky mode it doesnt bring all the episode information over so im left to run through it all in Semi-Automatic mode and just leave it running in the background until its done each series (or a couple of series at a time if theres something on tv to watch).  Is this a bug on Thumgen or is it something in the settings - strange how Manual and SemiAutomatic work fine but Automatic and I Feel Lucky mode dont.

Well - up to the “T”'s now so not much left to do - if anyone knows of a fix or if this is a genuine bug - let me know in case I need to add more shows at a later date.

Thanks.

make sure you check mark “Main/extra movisheet metadata” then once built with correct DATA all other reloads[changing themes, images] will be much easier, automated and faster. Instead of manual, semi, auto, lucky you choose metadata

Yeah - that that ticked.

The main problem was that if you run anything other than Manual or Semi-Automatic it wouldnt create the tv show information on the .xml file.

Now ive run through them all in Semi-Automatic mode it has generated the .xml files correctly and all is working great.