WD TV Live Streaming Media Player metathumb

WD TV Live Media Player won’t put the picture on the file along with the movie info. I’ve been using these devices for years and suddenly when I click on a movie and hit “Get Info” it will do the same procedure as always, but it won’t show the pic of the movie or add it to it. The info is all there, just no picture.

If you look in the folder the movie is in it has the .XML file and a Metathumb, but the Metathumb is 0 bytes.

I’ve tried all I know to do. I deleted the entire WDTV folder on my external hard drive and every .xml and .metathumb.

I just put the device on auto to get the info and it got the info, but again no pic

Please help!

sources for scrapping metadata eg. TMDB, TVDB etc change their Code/API’s all the time and since the WDTV Media Players are no longer updated (since 2014 … 7 Years ago) they can’t support any changes to how these sites provide metadata.

the only thing you can do is to manually provide a thumbnail

the “Metathumb” is actually a JPEG (*.jpg) file… so, manually download a movie thumbnail in jpg format and rename it from .jpg to .metathumb and it should display when you reboot the WD TV.

Thank you for the response.

Is there a way to change to a different source that does update?

Man I messed up then. I deleted the ones I had already in hopes that a clean sweep might help it. We’re talking about hundreds of movies I would need to put a thumbnail in…

nope. sources are coded into the WD TV’s Firmware which WD no longer update.

You’ll need to find a PC based Media scraper then to automatically scrape your movies and then use a batch file renamer to rename the .jpg to .metathumb extension.

Just an example i can quickly think of … i use a Raspberry Pi 4 with Kodi Software (which is also available for PC) you could scrape your movie collection (Kodi always updates it’s scraper regularly) and the Export the Media Library (separate files) and the movie thumbnails will be named eg. Tenet-poster.jpg , Wonder Woman-poster.jpg etc etc

then just download a free batch file renamer to rename -poster.jpg to .metathumb which will take seconds for hundreds and thousands of files.

Thanks a lot for the response and info! I really appreciate it