Pulling stills from videos for fanart automatically

[lucasbuck]

I'm using Phoenix and BMT. I have a lot of home movies. Is there any kind of automated process where I could pull still frames to use as fanart, so that it will display in Phoenix? I noticed in Phoenix it has media snapshot that shows a few frames. I thought maybe there was a way in BMT to capture them to use. Or maybe something stand alone. Thanks for any info!

[stuckless]

There's nothing there right now. I've thought about doing this, and it's good idea, but I'm not sure it's something that I'll ever get around to doing. Maybe it's something might end up in core phoenix someday, since as you pointed out, the APIs are there to capture frames from the files.

[lucasbuck]

Thanks for the reply. So if you used a screen capture program, and it saved the capture with the same name as the video file, is there any easy way to associate the two?

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by lucasbuck

Thanks for the reply. So if you used a screen capture program, and it saved the capture with the same name as the video file, is there any easy way to associate the two?

You can easily add you your own fanart, manually, if that's what you are asking.

If each of your home movies has it's own folder, then you can put a folder.jpg in the folder as well, which will become the "poster". If you create a "background.jpg" then that will be a custom background.

ie,

HomeMovies/Movie1/folder.jpg
HomeMovies/Movie1/background.jpg
HomeMovies/Movie1/movie.avi

Or, if all your movies are in the same folder you can create an image that is the same name as the movie file.

ie,
HomeMovies/movie1.avi
HomeMovies/movie1.jpg
HomeMovies/movie2.avi
HomeMovies/movie2.jpg

And you can then update the display title using BMT if you want.

[lucasbuck]

Thanks, I've been playing around with it. So if you have several movies in one folder, you can only have a poster? You can't have different pictures to appear in the background when the file is highlighted? (The posters are kinda small, and rectangular, it would be nice if it could be a background).

And sorry for being dim, but what did you mean by change the display title?

[stuckless]

You can have complete fanart but it's a little more complicated, because you need to understand how fanart works.

Basically, you'd need to set the Metadata using BMT on the mediafile, and then you can put fanart in the central fanart directory for the posters and backgrounds.

You can set a single background if the files are in the same folder by using the fomat
HomeMovies/movie1_backgrround.jpg

[lucasbuck]

That did what I want. Thanks again for being so helpful, and all the great work on the plugins!