Getting Twonky to display Folder Thumbnails (Note - this is not working properly)

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
1

All,
      one of the (minor) irritants that I find with Twonky is that it will not display ‘folder.jpg’ files. I have my video files arranged by Genre folders (e.g. Sci-Fi, Western, Comedy) and I place a suitable ‘folder’jpg’ in each. I also have equivalent files for TV series folders and Movie Boxset Collections. My WDTV Streaming unit honours such files, as does my Mezzmo server - but  Twonky does not. It simply shows the image associated with the first media file located in the folder structure.

However, I have found a way of tricking Twonky into displaying a custom image for a folder:-

  1. Create a ‘dummy’ media file in the required location using an JPG image file as source
  2. Use a target name to ensure it is listed first
  3. Set the file as hidden

e.g… using my existing ‘folder.jpg’ files

  • copy folder.jpg .1.mkv
  • attrib +h .1.mkv

To update a complete folder structure

  • forfiles /p /m folder.jpg /s /c “cmd /c copy @file .1.mkv”
  • forfiles /p  /m .1.mkv /s /c “cmd /c attrib +h @file”

The result is that when browsing by folder, Twonky renders the folder using the dummy media file .1.mkv. However on navigating into the folder, Twonky will ignore the hidden file and only allows genuine media files to be accessed.

Cheers

2

:cry:

I may have posted a little hastily. It seems that the effect that I was hoping for is still a bit hit and miss, especially when the folder structure has sub-folders (and in particular hidden ones like .wd_TV).

Back to the drawing board…

3

Thanks for sharing Bodders, this type of modifications are not supported, but maybe some of the other community users can share some advice on how to accomplish what you want to do. 

4

Bodders wrote:

:cry:

 

I may have posted a little hastily. It seems that the effect that I was hoping for is still a bit hit and miss, especially when the folder structure has sub-folders (and in particular hidden ones like .wd_TV).

 

Back to the drawing board…

Or if you don’t want to go through any hassel and you’re connecting to the My Cloud with a WDTV SMP, don’t use UPnP/DLNA (Twonky) and add the My Cloud as a Windows (SMB) or Linux (NFS) network location to the Media Library.

Then all your thumbnails and metadata will show up.

5

Bodders wrote:

:cry:

 

I may have posted a little hastily. It seems that the effect that I was hoping for is still a bit hit and miss, especially when the folder structure has sub-folders (and in particular hidden ones like .wd_TV).

 

Back to the drawing board…

@Bodders - I’ve used Twonky for some time on my MyBook Live and now the MyCloud.  Twonky struggles with thumbnails on music; I assume there are similar issues with videos.

It looks like you are already SSH’ing into the box, so I will tell you what I do whenever I make significant changes to my media collection:

/etc/init.d/twonky stop

rm -rf /CacheVolume/twonkymedia/db* 

/etc/init.d/twonky start

This clears and resets the thumbnail database and Twonky will regenerate all of them on restart and rescan.

The ealier post is probably the best advice, which is use something like WDTV and an SMB mount, instead of DLNA.  For music I’ve switched to minimServer and have never looked back.

Good luck!