Hi all. I have an .mkv file of the Disney movie Pinocchio. When I used the WDTV Live to ‘Get Content’ it got a thumbnail with the word Pinocchio written in some Hindu or Arabic language. I can find other images to use but I don’t know how to change the image pointed to in the XML file for that movie and I don’t know why it keeps finding a foreign language version of the movie poster when using ‘Get Content’.
Can someone shed some light on this??
P.S. Just to add some info: All of the content is in English as it should be; only the thumbnail is in a foreign language.
The issue isn’t with the SMP, it’s with TMDB were the thumbs are scraped from.
Unlike the metadata, the thumbs don’t necessary get sort by their language, so when the API scrapes the thumb it just uses the highest rated thumb instead of scraping for the highest rated by language.
In the case of Pinocchio, the highest rated cover is this:
Which is what I assume is what you have, being that it is the only Arabic cover.
Even if you use thumbgen, in Automatic mode, you will most likely get the same cover, because as I said, it has to do with TMDB.
There is only 2 things you can do. One, download the thumb you want to use and then save (replace) it as the .metathumb for your movie.
Or use Thumbgen, in Manual mode, and select the thumb you want and then generate it as the .metathumb.
In either case, for the new thumb to show up you’ll need to clear your media library after.
This is interesting about replacing the *.metathumb. I’m trying to figure out how that is related to *.jpg, if you put such an image in the folder with the same name as the movie. I thought I read that would be used as the thumbnail/poster for the movie, in preference to one downloaded from themoviedb.org, but that’s not working for me. None of this stuff is really documented in the User Guide, it would be nice if someone could lay it all out in a sticky or someplace.
I also can’t get an image named “folder.jpg” to show up as an image representing the folder that contains it. Always the first movie thumbnail in the folder is used for the folder.
Here’s the thing, .metethumb is just a .jpg. The .metathumb extension is used for thumbs if you use the internal scraper. Metathumb is not a “real” extension and is only used specifically for the SMP/HUB.
The folder.jgp issue is true, but if you use the internal scapper you have to use “1.metathumb” or “A.metathumb” for the folder thumb to get it to display.
Alternately you can change all your .metathumbs extensions to .jpg, then the folder.jpg will be used. To do that and not have to manually change all your .metathumbs manually you can download this bat file: http://www.mediafire.com/?6tees164f3u3u96
Then copy the bat file to all your folders that have metathumbs and run it (if the thumbs are on a NAS, then you need to make sure your accessing it as a Mapped drive) and it will change all the metathumbs to jpg in just a couple of seconds. You have to run the bat file for each folder.
What ever you do though, you have to make sure that you Clear the Media LIbrary before the changes will take effect.
Thanks, now I’m starting to get it. Yes, I’m using the internal scraper. So in my case, to use my own images, they need to be named *.metathumb (although apparently it will use folder.jpg if there are NO metathumb files in the folder, and it will use a *.jpg as a movie image if it can’t find anything for that movie online so there is no *.metathumb ). There are so many different ways to use this little box, I can see what’s true in one setup might not be so in another.
