Folder thumbnails not working with UPnP share

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live & Live Plus
1

I have the following folder structure and the WDTV Live will not show the Folder Thumbnail, but it will show the File Thumbnail.

movie 1.mkv

movie 1.jpg

folder.jpg

The user manual says the folder.jpg should be displayed as the Folder Thumbnail, but it is not.  The “movie 1.jpg” file is being used as the File Thumbnail.  I have not tried this out via shared folders or on a local drive, but most of the time I use my UPnP server to play files.  Anybody know why this doesn’t work?

Forgot to mention the files are less than 70KB in size.

2

I tried copying the directory to a USB drive, and it still did not work properly.  It was actually worse as the Folder Thumbnail and the File Thumbnail were not show.  The WDTV Live used a screen capture from the movie instead of the “movie 1.jpg” or “folder.jpg” file I had in the directory.

3

I have the same problem. With Media Server, no thumbnails visible and when accessing NAS as Network Share, I have the following problems with thumbnails:

  • Folder thumbnails are not working at all

  • Movie thumbnails are displayed double (first as JPG and then as the thumbnail for the AVI file)

  • Movie thumbnails are not shown if the filename contains ANY special characters (like ( ) or additional dots (.))

Hope WD will improve this soon

4

there is a workaround that i found on another forum, it works quite well, not perfect, but best workaround i’ve seen…

http://community.wdc.com/t5/General-Discussions/Double-Thumbnail-Workaround-that-WORKS-for-NETWORK-SHARES/m-p/10946#M3970

5

Has anybody heard anything new regarding this?  I would rather wait for an official fix from Western Digital, but I don’t know if there even working on a solution.  The pre-release firmware doesn’t mention anything about fixing thumbnail mode.

6

I can’t answer for anything other than network share or local drive (since I don’t use UPnP share) but there are three pecularities with external thumbnails I know of:

  1. They are case sensitive – which is to say they must not only be named the same as the movie but must have the same case (which is why it’s just best to copy the movie name and put it as the thumb nail name)

  2. They must not be too big – haven’t *quite* figured out the limit, but using thumbs under 80K or so is the safest.  Using too large a thumbnail definitely does not work.

  3. When you make changes you either need to erase the catalog file (if a local drive) or reset the unit (by going to standby and then pulling the power cord).  This last one used to drive me crazy (well, crazier) during my tests of thumbs.

The other issue with network shares and thumbs is that it’s broken to the degree that the external thumbs also show up as jpegs in the directory (which is a royal PITA but at least they work).

7

mkelley wrote:

 

  1. They must not be too big – haven’t *quite* figured out the limit, but using thumbs under 80K or so is the safest.  Using too large a thumbnail definitely does not work.

 

70kB is the limit.