[rmrector]

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As for the fadelabel, I've been using it for a month, and when combined with some nice inclusions, the fadelabel even allows for rotation settings. For me, it provides a slightly faster experience than the smartseries. I feel as if there is a split second in the plugin call where there is a shadow while it gets triggered. The fadelabel doesn't have this, and you can even trigger it with animations as you see fit. However, I don't know why that won't work with the seasons and episodes. It seems that it simply wasn't built that way, and has to be bypassed somehow. From the skinning side of things, I'm looking to see if it's possible to invoke the series filepath or dbid, or something, when browsing the seasons and episodes. That would have the effect of freezing the fanart cycle as if it was perpetually focused on the series' title, whenever you enter to browse them, and would simply leave it in place. Not sure if that's possible, though.

As for the thumbs, I'm not sure, but all of the thumbs that are in my library seem to be either actual thumbs, or fanart images properly downscaled to 780x439. I'm a bit confused since I distinctly remember you being right - I've seen badly downscaled images from when fanart was downloaded as a thumb, but I simply could not find any examples of it in my library. Perhaps something was changed? I'm not a big fan of the things, but some views in my skin simply use them, and the only thing worse than using a bad thumb is using no thumb at all. I corrected it with using landscape, which helped a bit, but not fully. The best way to fill that void is definitely animated artwork, for me at least. In that regard, I have to echo the question of somehow downloading them properly or automatically. As it is now, they do not download automatically, but I presume that has more to do with the infrastructure available for them, and it's not something you can alter?

I also have a question concerning the artwork in the sets. How do you go about changing, say, the disc for a movie set? When I go and change it in Manage/Select artwork/discart, all I get are posters from the movies within a set, and a browse option. However, since all the images are in the cache, that's just not applicable in this case. I literally couldn't find a way other than manually downloading the new image, placing it in the local folder, and browsing to it. Which is too convoluted a process, IMO. Is there no way of going online and returning a list of discs? I would rather go through a list of all the discs for all of the movies within a set than nothing at all. Also, if I go to Manage/Select artwork to add, instead of getting an actual choice, I get random options for a different film. Again, not sure how much you can change, and how much is Kodi's inner workings...

Yeah, the plugin does have a small delay; less so on LibreElec than Windows, but it's still there. I took a moment to see how the fadelabel behaves, and it's not bad, but different. With the multiimage and plugin path the multiimage grabs a new starting image every time the path changes, so flipping between two series brings up different artwork each time, but the fadelabel seems to keep its random choice even when labels change, so it will show the same image for each series until it picks a new random choice. I did get it to show series artwork when viewing seasons and episodes, by giving the fadelabel the labels $INFO[ListItem.Art(tvshow.fanart1)] and so on. Navigating to a list of seasons had no trouble keeping the same image, but navigating to episodes from the season or TV show often did cause it to pick a new one (I think it'll be down to the slight difference in time when grabbing the info from the database and filling the list). Also, the time an image is displayed is based on the length of the URL/path, so it can be different for each image.

For thumbs, Artwork Downloader downloaded backdrops from TheMovieDB, which were usually stills from the movie, and resized them itself, so they won't be affected. The next time I'm in the mood to get deep in Kodi's guts I may look into changing that final resize to produce a better result when heavily downsizing an image, so that skins could use fanart in a small thumbnail box, rather than the Beef downloading and resizing fanart itself. Ditto animated artwork, I'd like to update Kodi to better support it so that the Beef just has to grab URLs, like regular artwork: animated artwork currently isn't fully cached (just the first frame), and Kodi will only display the full animated version when the image is stored on a local HDD, or with a clever path substitution it can reach LAN shares. There is a server than has animated artwork, though, Skin Helper Service will grab images from it with the right configuration. It's not an official web service like fanart.tv, so I'm not sure what the policy to access the images is, but the first step is either update Kodi or break down and have the Beef download images.

Set artwork should work the same as other media types, for now it doesn't offer a way to choose an image from one of the movies inside. I had considered it, but then decided against it because skinners can get artwork from movies in sets in another way (I think a list can be filled with a set's movies by building a library path with the setID). Now it doesn't seem like a bad option to at least allow for manual selection of that artwork, though. For that second problem, is it just one set? It may have misidentified the set, and the new set has only posters, so it skipped over that first window with the button that allows you to search for a new (and hopefully correct) set. I'll put that button on the second window, too, I think. Or not skip that first window in this case (though I do like it skipping directly to episode fanart).

@nikeb Great. If it happens again with after other changes and doesn't clear up after a short while, you might ping marcelveldt, the developer of both Skin Helper Service, the add-on that actually grabs this data and uses the other add-on, simplecache which then caches the data for X amount of time.