Discovery about metathumb substitution for folders

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Hub Discussions
1

Hi All.

I, like many others who have posted, have been plagued by my WDTV Live Hub substituting movie metathumbs  for the folder.jpegs that I designed for my genre folders. This morning I noticed that the metathumbs chosen ito replace my folder.jpg’s were always the smallest files (in kilobytes) among all my thumbs in a given folder (and always much smaller than the filesize of my folder.jpg).

So, what I did was to reduce (I’m on a Mac using Photoshop and Preview) the file size of my folder.jpg’s so that they are smaller than any of my movie thumbnails. I also followed other forum suggestions and changed the names of my newly-reduced folder.jpg’s to “_folder.metathumb”. After doing this, and trashing hidden files on my hard drive that were created by the WDTV Live Hub, and rebooting my hard drives and the WDTV Live Hub,  the proper icons appeared as my folder icons and even after opening and closing the folders several times, there were no substitutions of movie metathumbs for the folder icons I had created.

Now, to be sure, I need to test this over several boots to be sure if my problem is solved, but I thought I’d post this now for any comments. I am using the latest firmware and my WDTV Live Hub is connected to 2 external WD hard drives, each hard drive having several genre folders.

Now, if I could just find a way to use my own jpegs in place of the generic folder icons the hub uses for my 3 hard drives.

2

Well you can in a way. You basically change some PNGs inside the theme. Now I would love to say I could have individual ones for each drive, but you cant.

The only thing you can do is have it for all. The way I have it setup is all files look the same as well, but thats because I usually put covers or folders on things straight away.

So I got a WD drive PNG and use that to make it look better.

1280×720 413 KB

3

Actually, the best solution for the issue of metathumbs overriding jpgs is to change the extension of all you thumbs to .jpg instead of .metathumb.

The .metathumb images will always take precedence over .jpgs, however if no .metathumbs exist, then there is no conflict and .jps will always be used.

The easiest way to do this is to create a new text document, then paste this line in it:

   ren *.metathumb *.jpg

Then save it and rename it from .txt to .bat, copy it to each folder where you have your files, then run the BAT file.  If you are doing this on the internal drive you must make sure you have the HUB mapped and run the BAT file that way.

4

Actually you can simply change the jpg extension to metathumb and call it something like"1folder.metathumb"

place this in the folder you want it to be seen as

rememer to rescan your folders to update media library

FYI sometimes it takes “gallery view” a while to update not sure why