2012-04-22, 05:07
I'm running a WHS that stores all my TV, movies, etc for my XBMC "clients" (ASRock running OpenElec and a Lenovo running WIn7). I have SickBeard set up to pull in the art/thumbs for the TV shows it downloads and store them in the same directory as the episodes are stored.
Question - is it possible to share the thumbnails when they are stored this way? Or do they need to be centrally stored so I can create a Symlink? Should I even bother with synching the artwork? I've read it slows things down a lot, but I've never really read of a better solution.
Movie posters are stored in a similar manner, locally with the video files in directories named for each Movie. I'm using Media Companion to pull in the metadata and art for the movies.
I've never intended for XBMC to scrape my media and store it on a local machine, I've always thought that the metadata was being pulled in from either SickBeard or Media Companion, but each install of XBMC probably still has scrapers set up for TV and Movies (I haven't ever turned them off) so local scraping could be happening. The TV shows seem to always pick up the artwork that SickBeard has pulled in, but movies are inconsistent. Some of the movie posters appear on both the Win 7 and OpenElec installs, some only appear on the Win 7, and some only on OpenElec. I think perhaps what ever install of XBMC I was using at the time the library was updated and found the new content got the artwork, and at the time I created the intial MySql database somehow each install got the art? Just a guess though. If a movie poster is missing, I can "refresh" the movie through the Movie Info option in the context menu and it will tell me that it found locally stored images and I can choose to use those at that time to fill in the missing posters.
Does anyone know what may actually be happening in my set up as far as the art/thumb selection? Does storing the media and art/thumbs in the same directory have any benefit, and/or is that the art that is being selected by each install of XBMC?
Question - is it possible to share the thumbnails when they are stored this way? Or do they need to be centrally stored so I can create a Symlink? Should I even bother with synching the artwork? I've read it slows things down a lot, but I've never really read of a better solution.
Movie posters are stored in a similar manner, locally with the video files in directories named for each Movie. I'm using Media Companion to pull in the metadata and art for the movies.
I've never intended for XBMC to scrape my media and store it on a local machine, I've always thought that the metadata was being pulled in from either SickBeard or Media Companion, but each install of XBMC probably still has scrapers set up for TV and Movies (I haven't ever turned them off) so local scraping could be happening. The TV shows seem to always pick up the artwork that SickBeard has pulled in, but movies are inconsistent. Some of the movie posters appear on both the Win 7 and OpenElec installs, some only appear on the Win 7, and some only on OpenElec. I think perhaps what ever install of XBMC I was using at the time the library was updated and found the new content got the artwork, and at the time I created the intial MySql database somehow each install got the art? Just a guess though. If a movie poster is missing, I can "refresh" the movie through the Movie Info option in the context menu and it will tell me that it found locally stored images and I can choose to use those at that time to fill in the missing posters.
Does anyone know what may actually be happening in my set up as far as the art/thumb selection? Does storing the media and art/thumbs in the same directory have any benefit, and/or is that the art that is being selected by each install of XBMC?
