2019-07-17, 22:18
Some of the answer about why AS works the way it does is because it's always worked that way. 
I took AS over from @ronie almost ten years ago, and while I've added a bunch of stuff around the edges and refactored code, the basic function is still the same. AS grabs artwork for a given artist from a set of sources and then stores that in either the userdata directory or a place of the user's choice. It creates some skin infolabels that skins can use to display the artwork, the primary one being a path to a folder that can be used in a multi-image.
I've been looking at at least adding an option to support the AIF, but I think I'm probably going wait until Kodi 19 so I can wrap that major change in with the Python 3 compatibility. I was also waiting to see if the spec for the AIF stabilized. The big challenge on my end is naming files. Right now AS saves the file using whatever filename the source site uses (so it's not actually a hash). Moving to AIF I'm going to have to have a one time routine to rename all the files to the fanart1, fanart2, etc. format, move them out of the extrafanart folder, and then add some logic to figure out what the next file name should be. It's not conceptually hard but it's hard to get the code right (at least for me). I really kind of wish Kodi could just look at a folder and use them all as fanart, as that would minimize the changes I have to make (which is selfish of me of course). When I looked at the wiki awhile back, it seemed like the amount of manual work a user had to do to enable the AIF and then tell Kodi what fanarts are there would mean very few folks would use it. But maybe that changed in the interim.
Anyway, I guess that's a really long way of saying AIF support is on the roadmap for AS.
I took AS over from @ronie almost ten years ago, and while I've added a bunch of stuff around the edges and refactored code, the basic function is still the same. AS grabs artwork for a given artist from a set of sources and then stores that in either the userdata directory or a place of the user's choice. It creates some skin infolabels that skins can use to display the artwork, the primary one being a path to a folder that can be used in a multi-image.I've been looking at at least adding an option to support the AIF, but I think I'm probably going wait until Kodi 19 so I can wrap that major change in with the Python 3 compatibility. I was also waiting to see if the spec for the AIF stabilized. The big challenge on my end is naming files. Right now AS saves the file using whatever filename the source site uses (so it's not actually a hash). Moving to AIF I'm going to have to have a one time routine to rename all the files to the fanart1, fanart2, etc. format, move them out of the extrafanart folder, and then add some logic to figure out what the next file name should be. It's not conceptually hard but it's hard to get the code right (at least for me). I really kind of wish Kodi could just look at a folder and use them all as fanart, as that would minimize the changes I have to make (which is selfish of me of course). When I looked at the wiki awhile back, it seemed like the amount of manual work a user had to do to enable the AIF and then tell Kodi what fanarts are there would mean very few folks would use it. But maybe that changed in the interim.
Anyway, I guess that's a really long way of saying AIF support is on the roadmap for AS.
