Video Thumbnails

[BobbyDing]

I have a drive with the families favorite holiday shows packed on it. The structure is separate folders for movies, animation, TV, etc.... with many shows in each folder, but no show has its own dedicated folder. Each show has its own thumbnail associated to it via the thumbnail has the same name of the show. I prefer not to use fanart for these, so that they thumbnails are consistent for the family.

This works fine under the stock (and Gemstone) Sage VIDEO|FOLDERS. And they show fine in the BMT web interface. But not so much under the Gemstone flows. What seems to happen is it works for the first few videos, then Gemstone uses a generic for most of the rest. In this case it's the thumbnail of the first video in that folder.

Am I doing something wrong? Or is this a known issue? Is there any way to force GS to use these thumbnails?

Sorry if this has been brought up before. I did look around but did not see anything about this.

Thanks!

Bobby

[jusjoken]

Do you have gemstone image options set to use folder fanart first?

k

[BobbyDing]

Checked all the image options and the "Check Folders First" /poster/banner/background are all set to NO.

If I set POSTERS to YES, it wants a specific file name for the posters.

Bobby

[jusjoken]

Let me give this one more thought.

I assume you have the central fanart directory set as you do use BMT and central fanart for other files.

k

[BobbyDing]

I am using fanart on two other flows, as well as for the TV views. Those all work well. One of those flows does have the movies in dedicated folder matching the movie names (in case that would matter). Do you think maybe it has to be all fanart or all thumbnails, but not both?

[jusjoken]

Nope... I think this is a situation we have not coded for.

Gemstone supports using Central Fanart and can also handle folder level fanart exceptions if they are named specifically in the options.

Looks like we would need an option to check for a fanart item matching the video file name.

Can you open an issue on the gemstone google code site so we don't forget this.

k

[BobbyDing]

Opened...#94.

[jusjoken]

What fanart type do you expect Gemstone to load from the file named mediafilename.jpg? As there can only be one file with this name do I assume it's a Poster, Banner or Background.

k

[Fuzzy]

I'm guessing most universal would be background - that's kind of the problem with this solution though... background would make the most sense in this case, because I think he's using screenshots. And option though:

<MediaFilename>.poster.jpg
<MediaFilename>.banner.jpg
<MediaFilename>.background.jpg

Do it this way, and he could do a one time fix

REN *.JPG *.BACKGROUND.JPG

on the gemstone front though, i'd default to background if the .poster or .banner tags aren't in there...

Have to be careful about feature bloat here though. Every one of these checks is another process that has to be done to display fanart, slowing the overall UI. This would make more sense to be done on the phoenix end - adding a fanart scraper that looks to folder's, and copies those images to the central fanart folder - this would allow it to still use the default phoenix api, and minimize redundant processes...

[BobbyDing]

In my case I download the movie posters and match them to the media file name. So I was/am looking for the mediafile.jpg to be interpreted as a poster. It would be great if the option were available to select how to treat them though. mediafile.jpg = poster or banner or background. If that's possible.

Thanks,

Bobby

[jusjoken]

I will come up with a solution that supports the mediafilename to be part of the filename you enter as fuzzy suggests.

I am not concerned about adding overhead as the check is only done if the image is not already cached in memory or in the filesystem cache and then only if this option is on.... so should not affect performance especially for those not using folder level fanart.... which is most people as there is a current issue with the folder level fanart that only 1 use has reported (already fixed in the next release).

k

[jusjoken]

This functionality has been added to the next release to support fanart located within the media file folder and named with the mediafilename. In the FileName field in the options menu you will just enter a "*" (without the quotes) to represent the medifilename if desired (these directions are displayed on the edit screen too).

So you can use any of the following masks....

poster.jpg --> matches "poster.jpg"
*poster.jpg --> matches "mediafilenameposter.jpg"
*_poster.jpg --> matches "mediafilename_poster.jpg"
*.poster.jpg --> matches "mediafilename.poster.jpg"
poster.*.jpg --> matches "poster.mediafilename.jpg"
etc....

*.jpg --> matches "mediafilename.jpg"
NOTE: this last one will work but if you use "*.jpg" for poster and background then the same file will be used for both and won't likely display properly... but that one will just be a buyer beware item

Check this out in the next release and let us know if this resolves the issue.

k

[BobbyDing]

Very Excellent!!! Thanks so much!!!

Bobby

[BobbyDing]

Could this feature have gotten broken in a recent update? It was working till I was taken down by the server outage. Removed and re-installed Gemstone after the server was back up. Rebooted PC and HD300. Everything came back but the thumbnails are once again all the same. I tried clearing memory & HD cache. No difference.

Sorry, I know you guys are busy.

Bobby

[jusjoken]

Originally Posted by BobbyDing

Could this feature have gotten broken in a recent update? It was working till I was taken down by the server outage. Removed and re-installed Gemstone after the server was back up. Rebooted PC and HD300. Everything came back but the thumbnails are once again all the same. I tried clearing memory & HD cache. No difference.

Sorry, I know you guys are busy.

Bobby

Should still be working. It may be possible that the properties got messed up so go in and reset them to your desired settings... even if they display on the screen... change them... exit that screen and change them back to what you want... this will ensure you are not just picking up the base server values.

Hope that helps... please report back.

k

[BobbyDing]

Thanks for the response. After I posted I removed my original flows and re-installed a new flow with the settings I'm interested in, and had the same results. So rather than screwing around with what might be a flawed install (after the glitch ) I installed Sage fresh on a different PC and installed only Gemstone (set up as its own server/client, not a client to the original pc). It has the same problem of showing all the same thumbnails again.

Bobby

[jusjoken]

Please open an issue on the issues site and attach your properties for the client as well as a sage and gemstone log so I can see what is happening.

k

[BobbyDing]

Thanks... Issue# 110.

[jusjoken]

Thanks for posting the details. The issue is related to how we generate a unique key for retieving the fanart and as all the movies and fanart are in the same folder then the key at the folder level is not unique enough... therefore all the items get the same fanart.

anyway... not a big issue to fix in the next version.

k

[jusjoken]

Originally Posted by jusjoken

Thanks for posting the details. The issue is related to how we generate a unique key for retieving the fanart and as all the movies and fanart are in the same folder then the key at the folder level is not unique enough... therefore all the items get the same fanart.

anyway... not a big issue to fix in the next version.

k

We are still working through this issue as although the logs clearly show the issue... I cannot create it myself yet... it works for me so I need more info on the settings being used in the Image Options.

k