[gjwAudio]

Hi Milhouse

Another fine - and confounding - piece of advice to work through...

...
3) Run AD to find logo/clearart for movies that don't already have such artwork - don't allow AD to download anything

4) Run mklocal.py again to download any non-standard local artwork that AD may have found in step #3

Soooooo, are you suggesting the settings in AD should always be like this:

Code:

Settings > Movies > Enable downloading = UNchecked (which blanks out all the artwork type choices)
    -and-
Settings > TV Shows > Enable downloading = UNchecked (which blanks out all the artwork type choices)
    -and-
Settings > Advanced > Use local files = UNchecked

and then it will only insert URLs to the database when it finds a hit for any art

AND then we use nr.4 above to download the URLs into our media folders ?

...finally completed by a texturecache.py c movies to pre-load all this new artwork... it that right ?

---

EDIT:

Haw-Haw... that stuff above pales in comparison to the steaming pile of sadness now known as my Video Library Through a confluence of bad juju, I've messed up about a third of the 550 or so films in the collection. Pretty awesome for a night's work.

I began with a clean slate (changed content type to NONE and then back, of Movies source). Let the Universal Movie Scraper run, and then set to, with the scripts.

The unsupported VIDEO_TS thing got me, adding bogus file references to the database. The mklocal script got so confused it even made up a PNG file for a movie with no such image in its folder. For example... a snip from the fixup.dat file being passed to mklocal.py...

Code:

{
    "items": {
      "art.clearlogo": "smb://FREENAS/media/Movies_VTS/A Noble Lie (2011)/VIDEO_TS-logo.png",
      "art.fanart": "smb://FREENAS/media/Movies_VTS/A Noble Lie (2011)/VIDEO_TS-fanart.jpg",
      "art.poster": "smb://FREENAS/media/Movies_VTS/A Noble Lie (2011)/VIDEO_TS-poster.jpg"
    },
    "libraryid": 2761,
    "title": "A Noble Lie: Oklahoma City 1995",
    "type": "movie"
  },

...which is supposed to represent files actually stored as:

Code:

FREENAS/media/Movies_VTS/A Noble Lie (2011)/A Noble Lie (2011)-banner.jpg
FREENAS/media/Movies_VTS/A Noble Lie (2011)/A Noble Lie (2011)-fanart.jpg
FREENAS/media/Movies_VTS/A Noble Lie (2011)/A Noble Lie (2011)-poster.jpg

Without dumping the whole Movies DB and searching for confirmation, my intuition says many of the images missing from the screen have scrambled or completely missing file references. Very hard to troubleshoot so many variations on the theme. I've got assorted banners missing, posters & thumbs, some movies are even missing the text version of the movie name, in place of a banner (ie: blank slot).

Looking at the media folders, I expected to see image files "made local" but it looks like nothing new is there. For example, this week I added the classic Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies, taking great pains to fabricate custom banners and extrathumbs. None of the posters found by AD made it to the media folders - I thought that was a main function of mklocal.py - to write a file into a media folder. Hmmm...

Before I saw the extent of the problem, I set out to manually fix the 12 VTS-type movies using the Choose Art button. Arrrrgh - that's what this week was supposed to avoid . Then I got curious and ran this:

Code:

OpenELEC:~/.kodi/userdata # ./texturecache.py jd movies "a noble lie"
[
  {
    "art": {
      "banner": "image://smb://FREENAS/media/Movies_VTS/A Noble Lie (2011)/A Noble Lie (2011)-banner.jpg/",
      "clearlogo": "image://smb://FREENAS/media/Movies_VTS/A Noble Lie (2011)/VIDEO_TS-logo.png/",
      "fanart": "image://smb://FREENAS/media/Movies_VTS/A Noble Lie (2011)/A Noble Lie (2011)-fanart.jpg/",
      "poster": "image://smb://FREENAS/media/Movies_VTS/A Noble Lie (2011)/A Noble Lie (2011)-poster.jpg/"
    },
    "file": "smb://FREENAS/media/Movies_VTS/A Noble Lie (2011)/VIDEO_TS.IFO",
    "label": "A Noble Lie: Oklahoma City 1995",
    "movieid": 2761,
    "title": "A Noble Lie: Oklahoma City 1995"
  }
]
OpenELEC:~/.kodi/userdata #

Interesting - the banner is now present (of course) but the bogus clearlogo PNG remains to be cleaned up.


And then, there's the "new and improved" Artwork Beef, which promises to bring a new era to art-scraping within Kodi. Well, it began failing 3 hours ago on an internal call (pykodi.py maybe...) for no apparent reason. So now I can't use any context menu calls for artwork repair, 'cause The Beef is Broken, and has hijacked the context buttons - and I don't know how to restore AD to it's former place of glory

Maybe this is when the crash course on MediaElch saves the day ?

Time for this soldier to hit the barracks .