2 days of research and experiments… and I am 90% there but I am going nuts and would love any suggestions.
Most things seem fine except file (video) icon images occassionaly wont appear even with metadata.
First up - my thanks to all the helpful folk who have posted on here and taught me the basics.
I have the WD Live SMP with latest firmware. I gave everyone read/write to my synology videos folder including NFS * priveleges. On the WD i have linux enabled.
I have media library on, with the Media Library manager for network share set to look at the \videos\tv point via a linux share. In the red ‘source’ button of the videos main menu item I have set the videos source to be ‘My Media Library’. I still have the default theme. I used the yellow button to select the view that has the metadata display with a row of bottom icons for the videos and the selected video icon big at the top left.
Because my media library was a bit of a duplicated and misnamed mess, I cleaned out the dupes and removed the metadata and then told Sickbeard to force a full update on a case by case basis. It is set to make the metadata how WDTV likes it: it has folder.jpg, filename.metathumb and filename.xml for any tv shows that I did this to.
Ater blowing away the WD media library and removing share and trying a reset and all other things I could think of, I cant get the icons to appear for some videos. The xml info is there ok but not icons. It seems like it can get an icon if it is a mkv file but not if its avi. So instead of using the metadata icon it is reading in the actual mkv file.
Current firmware wants jpg files named .metathumb doesn’t it?
It is currently reading the XML ok and displays that info. It’s just that some episodes don’t have an icon showing.
Also, I don’t think the default meta sources are picking up my data but most are ok because sickbeard populates it for me. Unfortunately it seems to always get banner type icons that don’t look as good as a portrait icon.
The icons do not have to be named *.metathumb. They can be, but don’t have to be.
If some of the icons are working and not others you can rule out the WDTV being the issue. Make sure that that the icon files are named EXACTLY the same as your video file (this includes any spaces and/or capitals). Another thing to look at is apostrophes. I was doing a little cutting and pasting of file names recently and the apostrophes were different and the WDTV would not recognise them.
I accidentally found two cool features that you all probably know but I didn’t. First is that hitting the red button in user themes lets you select more than just the single Mochi theme.
The second and the best was that even with the default Mochi theme the background in videos can have various JPG files slideshowing behind the show data. Quite cool effect.
I discovered this accidentally when looking through my shows on Wdtv. Suddenly the sky background changed to a slideshow of images. Now the structure on disk of this particular shows files is extensive and multi layered, so I intend copying it safely away then simplifying it down until I can understand what bits do what. The only problem is that I am not confident that ‘rescan’ will find the new changes I make and also that it won’t have cached old icons etc…
So if anyone knows a sure way short of deleting the media info and reloading for just one show then I would be most grateful. I know of the options button… That’s the rescan I mentioned…
BTW The spellings were identical on the icons that DON’T show up as I mentioned earlier. ( a different show than the wonderful background one)
I have the same problem with some movies. I have two folders right next to each other; Frances Ha and Forrest Gump. Both folders are exactly the same, same file type for the movie .mp4 and both have xml files and meta files downloaded through thumbgen.
Frances Ha shows an icon photo on the synopsis page but Forrest Gump doesn’t. I can’t figure it out.
Mine has behaved just like a computer… Garbage in, garbage out.
It seems to be working fine when you get all the ducks in a row. I suggest you have a look inside the XML file. It probably has a slight difference between its contents and the names and locations actually in your folder. My difficulties were discrepancies between what the XML had and what my file names were.
I hope you get some joy with it. One thing too is that some caching occurs so you may need to turn it off (which puts it in standby) leave it like that for a while then on and if no joy try holding remote power off for about 5 seconds to give it a real power off. Alternatively use the system menu to perform a restart.
A restart through the menu resolved most of my image display issues! Thank you! I still have a few that are not displaying properly, I’m going to check out the xml files. Thanks!
I’m also new. I’ve been able to work things out - for the most part - with movies, but I have a feeling my music files are going to be much more difficult.
