2012-12-12, 02:45
With all the much welcomed changes in Frodo for a more sanitised way of dealing with artwork - I still think there's more could be done (assuming I've not missed any new features that declare my suggestion null and void)....
As things stand - we have metadata / artwork files as siblings of a media item - e.g. a movie.avi will have a sibling movie.nfo, movie-poster, movie-fanart etc, but we have actor thumbs in a subdirectory of their own? (.actors)
One school of thought might argue that makes sense, in order to avoid pollution of the movie folder with many actor thumbs.
Another school of thought might argue that contradicts the policy for fanart, posters and banners.
To my mind (and I appreciate it's likely to be a minority view) - it would be far better to place ALL xbmc meta data in it's own 'sibling' folder as such:
<some media file>
<some media file>.xbmcmeta\poster.jpg
<some media file>.xbmcmeta\fanart.jpg
<some media file>.xbmcmeta\banner.jpg
<some media file>.xbmcmeta\thumb.jpg
<some media file>.xbmcmeta\info.nfo
<some media file>.xbmcmeta\actor.clint_eastwood.jpg
<some media file>.xbmcmeta\actor.sondra_locke.jpg
This way, all the meta data is held under the xbmc folder (allowing very easy identification), it effectively creates a whole XBMC namespace for files and it prevents collision with other media center meta files, and last but not least, it helps to keep things 'tidy'. So there's only one metadata sibling per media item.
It could even be extended to support per user metadata (eg. different covers per user, through the use of xbmcmeta\user1\)
Of course, the specific names used aren't important - it's the concept of a catch all 'xbmcmeta' folder that's important.
It's just something to think about.
As things stand - we have metadata / artwork files as siblings of a media item - e.g. a movie.avi will have a sibling movie.nfo, movie-poster, movie-fanart etc, but we have actor thumbs in a subdirectory of their own? (.actors)
One school of thought might argue that makes sense, in order to avoid pollution of the movie folder with many actor thumbs.
Another school of thought might argue that contradicts the policy for fanart, posters and banners.
To my mind (and I appreciate it's likely to be a minority view) - it would be far better to place ALL xbmc meta data in it's own 'sibling' folder as such:
<some media file>
<some media file>.xbmcmeta\poster.jpg
<some media file>.xbmcmeta\fanart.jpg
<some media file>.xbmcmeta\banner.jpg
<some media file>.xbmcmeta\thumb.jpg
<some media file>.xbmcmeta\info.nfo
<some media file>.xbmcmeta\actor.clint_eastwood.jpg
<some media file>.xbmcmeta\actor.sondra_locke.jpg
This way, all the meta data is held under the xbmc folder (allowing very easy identification), it effectively creates a whole XBMC namespace for files and it prevents collision with other media center meta files, and last but not least, it helps to keep things 'tidy'. So there's only one metadata sibling per media item.
It could even be extended to support per user metadata (eg. different covers per user, through the use of xbmcmeta\user1\)
Of course, the specific names used aren't important - it's the concept of a catch all 'xbmcmeta' folder that's important.
It's just something to think about.
