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How to Fully Populate Movie Library Thumbnails?

Posted: Fri Mar 17, 2017 6:19 pm
by GlueckAuf
As a new user of the EPG123-enabled alternative to Rovi, I couldn't be happier with the vastly improved accuracy and detail that sourcing Schedules Direct data vs Rovi has delivered to my Media Center PC. Well worth the annual investment.

My Movie Library's thumbnails are now, finally back to 100% accuracy, vs the maybe 20% right, 80% WRONG artwork I had with Rovi after the changeover from Zap2It. The only remaining issue is that about half of the movies in my recording folders lack an image of any kind.

Is there a way to force WMC with EPG123 to populate these titles? (I suspect the movies missing artwork are mostly or all movies I had recorded before my upgrade to EPG123).

Thanks for a great fix for the Microsoft-Rovi indifference to quality.

GlueckAuf

Re: How to Fully Populate Movie Library Thumbnails?

Posted: Fri Mar 17, 2017 7:54 pm
by rkulagow
I've sent garyan2 an email to see how feasible it would be to implement a search function. (The search function on the server side is fairly simple, but I don't know how easy it would be to update MCE)

Re: How to Fully Populate Movie Library Thumbnails?

Posted: Fri Mar 17, 2017 8:34 pm
by garyan2
Here's some rules I've learned while working with epg123.

The artwork for series and movies (actually the link to the image) is not part of the metadata of the wtv file.
Once the artwork information is purged/dies-out from the database, the original artwork will no longer by seen.
This is especially noticeable in the movie library... the images you actually have currently are not from epg123, but from AMG.
You will only get AMG movie posters if the movie has a title and a YEAR which Rovi data was lacking and download is enabled.

If I were a betting man, I would say most of your movies in the library that don't have posters, also don't have the year populated. If that is the case, than it would be possible to edit the WTV metadata to include the year and pull the coverart from AMG after that.

So to answer part of your question, no it is not possible for epg123 to populate the artwork of past recorded movies, especially from Rovi. At least not that I am aware of.

Re: How to Fully Populate Movie Library Thumbnails?

Posted: Fri Mar 17, 2017 8:41 pm
by dkrom
Mine were not populating, but oddly enough if I clicked each empty movie and waited a second the correct image would appear. Once I did that to all of my movies I had all the images. This worked for all the movies I recorded while on ROVI.

Re: How to Fully Populate Movie Library Thumbnails?

Posted: Fri Mar 17, 2017 9:24 pm
by garyan2
dkrom wrote:Mine were not populating, but oddly enough if I clicked each empty movie and waited a second the correct image would appear. Once I did that to all of my movies I had all the images. This worked for all the movies I recorded while on ROVI.
Well that was unexpected. Are the images of the correct aspect ratio? in other words, does it look like a poster or a stretch 4:3 image?

Re: How to Fully Populate Movie Library Thumbnails?

Posted: Sat Mar 18, 2017 12:42 am
by IT Troll
Recorded TV HD does a great job with movie posters and plays nicely with EPG123.

Re: How to Fully Populate Movie Library Thumbnails?

Posted: Sat Mar 18, 2017 12:56 am
by dkrom
garyan2 wrote:
dkrom wrote:Mine were not populating, but oddly enough if I clicked each empty movie and waited a second the correct image would appear. Once I did that to all of my movies I had all the images. This worked for all the movies I recorded while on ROVI.
Well that was unexpected. Are the images of the correct aspect ratio? in other words, does it look like a poster or a stretch 4:3 image?
They are the movie poster.

Re: How to Fully Populate Movie Library Thumbnails?

Posted: Tue Jun 25, 2019 8:17 am
by aklijn
I've recently installed EPG123 and am happy with the results. However, I wanted to confirm that this installation will result in removing all previously recorded movie artwork. Is there any way to recover/refresh this particular artwork and still just leave the .wtv file in the standard Recorded TV directory without having to move them to a "movies" folder and running a 3rd party app to create custom sub-folders. It does appear that any future recorded movies will at least have the proper artwork. Thanks.

Re: How to Fully Populate Movie Library Thumbnails?

Posted: Tue Jun 25, 2019 1:04 pm
by jachin99
Moving the file usually refreshes the thumbnail. You can simply create a new folder in your current directory, move the files there, and then move them back if your thumbnails get destroyed.

Re: How to Fully Populate Movie Library Thumbnails?

Posted: Tue Jun 25, 2019 1:08 pm
by jachin99
garyan2 wrote: Fri Mar 17, 2017 8:34 pm Here's some rules I've learned while working with epg123.

The artwork for series and movies (actually the link to the image) is not part of the metadata of the wtv file.
Once the artwork information is purged/dies-out from the database, the original artwork will no longer by seen.
This is especially noticeable in the movie library... the images you actually have currently are not from epg123, but from AMG.
You will only get AMG movie posters if the movie has a title and a YEAR which Rovi data was lacking and download is enabled.

If I were a betting man, I would say most of your movies in the library that don't have posters, also don't have the year populated. If that is the case, than it would be possible to edit the WTV metadata to include the year and pull the coverart from AMG after that.

So to answer part of your question, no it is not possible for epg123 to populate the artwork of past recorded movies, especially from Rovi. At least not that I am aware of.
When I looked into this whole issue, I found that the image file is stored in a byte data array in WM/Picture field. I haven't found any program that can easily restore an image in this field if it gets lost.