[Dida]

Hi there,
as a former user of XBMC for X-Box I was surprised and happy about the fact that this great soft has found its way to the PC already - heard about it some time ago but I didn't know it's already running that good (in my case).
So I just wanted to say thank you for all the work you put into this

After trying out several tweaks and getting the MCE remote working I wanted to mess around with the movie library a little bit - my HTPC is not connected to the internet (and I have not planned on doing otherwise yet) and I prefer my own thumbnails of episodes, folders and other artwork.

The problem I have is, using the .nfo file for a movie I just can't seem to get the freaking movie thumbs to work
After researching hours and hours the only explanation I have is either this build of XBMC does not support actor thumbs yet or the path to a local pic (C:\actor.jpg for example) must be somehow tagged with a file:// or something like that...

Would be nice if anyone could help me out with this one

[Dida]

I just noticed a typo - I meant to say the actor thumbs are not displayed, not the movie thumbs...sorry

[jmarshall]

Yes, they're not supported as yet from local sources.

[Dida]

I see, so I should wait for a future release - thanks for your response

[jmarshall]

No, you should do a patch for it. Otherwise you may be waiting forever.

An alternative is to bribe a developer

The final alternative is waiting + hoping a dev feels like adding said feature.

[Dida]

If you could give me a hint to do so, I would spend some time in getting myself into this subject

Any chance of using the pathsubstitution thinggy? As far as I understand, the actor thumbs seem to be working with online images from imdb and co. - but it does not know how to handle local file paths.

<pathsubstitution>
<substitute>
<from>C:\actorthumbs\</from>
<to>smb://somecomputer/g-share/actorthumbs/</to>
</substitute>
</pathsubstitution>

Maybe this isn't the way to go, but I just thought about it...I appreciate your input to this matter, maybe someday I will get to see Nicolas Cage's face in the Cast overview from Ghost Rider (the file I was trying so hard to get it work, kinda hate it bye now)

[jmarshall]

What it would involve is the following:

1. Check what a normal online lookup does with respect to actor thumbs. An actor can likely have more than one thumb url associated with it for instance.

2. Store the local paths in the same way (i.e. same xml format).

3. Allow the thumb downloader to pick up whether it's a web-based URL or a "local" file. I suspect this is done in CVideoInfoScanner::FetchActorThumbs (VideoInfoScanner.cpp) - I'd be tempted to put the code for it in the function it calls CScraperUrl:: DownloadThumbnail as then it'll work for all thumbs of this type. Basically do something like the following (after the check for an empty url and before the http download)

Code:

CURL url(entry.m_url);
  if (url.GetProtocol() != "http")
  { // do a direct file copy
    try
    {
      CPicture picture;
      return picture.DoCreateThumbnail(entry.m_url, thumb);
    }
    catch (...)
    {
      ::DeleteFile(thumb.c_str());
    }
    return false;
  }

Cheers,
Jonathan

[kraqh3d]

fyi, path substitution is only used by the code that loads playlists.

[billyad2000]

I've been looking into this for Media Companion and I was wondering if the path for actor thumbnails must be stored as a url.

My thinking is that it could be possible to store the files in a local folder on your PC eg.

C:\Program Files\Media Companion\Resources\Actors\

Then Media Companion could save movie actors in that location, maybe using the IMDB ID eg:- nm0005132.jpg for Heath Ledger

Making sure that the Actors folder is shared and available via SMB etc the path could be added to the nfo file instead of the url
eg

<actor>
<name>Heath Ledgername>
<role>The Joker</role>
<thumb>smb://Workgroup;user:password@username/Actors/nm0005132.jpg</thumb>
</actor>

I would appreciate it if someone could test this to see if it works.

[spiff]

it wouldn't work currently but i will make sure to add it (and ofc so you can just do a relative address if you prefer)

[billyad2000]

it wouldn't work currently but i will make sure to add it (and ofc so you can just do a relative address if you prefer)

That would be great, it's the only easy way I can think of to implement local thumb support while removing the need for actors to be stored repeatedly, eg for each movie.

The same method would work ok for TV Shows with a little modification. If people want to use actors from IMDB then the same applies and if they want to use those from TVDB then a maybe a local actor directory in each tvshow folder. It would only contain half a dozen thumbs for each show since for the most part TVDB only has thumbs for the main cast.

It would also speed up Media Companion since browsing is slowed down considerably by the continually downloading actor thumbnails.