[realcopacetic]

As part of the skin I'm working on with Hitcher (Copacetic), I've been working on putting together some higher resolution episode thumbnail collections. The skin is designed to put high quality fanart front and centre, and with 1080p thumbs, it really sings.

TVDB's are very low quality at this point and Trakt.tv isn't much better. Last I heard, fanart.tv wasn't considering any new artwork types at this point, but I'll suggest it to them for future consideration.

For anything recent/ongoing, it's pretty easy to get huge promo episode photos so you could even go higher than 1080p for a lot of these if you wanted.

Here are a couple of examples:
Game of Thrones Seasons 1-5 (A quality)
Gotham Season 1 (A)
The Walking Dead Seasons 1-5 (A)

I have the following that I can upload if there's interest, was hoping others might have some as well and we could post them here for now:

- Band of Brothers (B-C quality)
- Bloodline Season 1 (A-)
- Breaking Bad Season 5 (A)
- Fargo Season 1 (A)
- Firefly Season 1 (B-C)
- Halt and Catch Fire Seasons 1-2 (A)
- Humans Season 1 (A)
- The Leftovers Season 1 (A)
- Life Story Series 1 (A)
- Marvel's Daredevil Season 1 (B)
- Mr Robot Season 1 so far (A)
- Orphan Black Season 1-3 (A)
- Planet Earth Series 1 (A)
- Rectify Season 3 (A)
- Silicon Valley Season 1-2 (A)
- Six Feet Under Season 1-5 (B-C)
- The Sopranos Season 1-6 (B)
- Treme Season 1-4 (A)
- True Detective Season 1-2 (A)
- Utopia Season 1-2 (A)
- The Wire Season 1-5 (A-B)

A few good sources I've found:
- SpoilerTV has a good selection of episode promo shots although they put a watermark in the top left corner. Usually these will crop out as they tend be taller than 1920x1080p when resized, but it's also handy as a source for knowing which screenshots go with which episodes, then you can use the 'Search Google for this Image' function to find the high-res versions without the watermark elsewhere. Going straight to Google can be tricky as there's often a lot of confusion online with which shots go with which episodes, as most people just use whatever whenever...
- Anything HBO you can get off their website for example in this example (http://www.hbo.com/silicon-valley/episod...index.html) - just open the picture in a new window and change the size in the url to 1920 - this seems to work with all the pictures episode pictures on their website that I've tried including the smaller thumbs under the main image, which are 300 by default, but changing that to 1920 gives you the HD version.
- Google Search by Image
-The ultimate would be going straight to the source, but you usually need some sort of press credentials to sign up for the studio/broadcaster's image libraries.

Here are a few quick pics to show you what they look like in action:

watch gallery

(This view of Copacetic was inspired by Refocus)

[realcopacetic]

Also added Justified Seasons 1-5 and Fringe Seasons 1-5 - had to use a few season promo shots to fill in the blanks for Justified seasons 1-2 but it works ok I think.

No interest in these?

[UsefulG]

Very nice work, I don't use this view on my machine but I appreciate the efforts.

[rmrector]

I like this idea; I have been disappointed with the low quality, random, and watermarked thumbs that TheTVDB generally offers.

Ohh hey! It looks like The Movie DB (not just movies anymore!) has a place for episode thumbs, and it takes all sizes (for instance, one from The Walking Dead is 3600x2025).

I have been working on an update for Artwork Downloader, and since there is an API to pull these down I would quite like to make another update that adds support for them. Probably with a new artwork type like 'hqthumb', so 'thumb' can stay at it's lower size for more reasonable uses. Does that sound like something that would be handy?

[Martijn]

No.
Why would you want that high quality episode thumbs? That would make it regular fanart.

episode "thumb" should stay the same name

[Martijn]

To add, there's absolutely no relation reference between tvdb and tmdb. Perhaps IMDB number is the same or might be filled in. However that's only at show level. On episode level there's nothing.
So if you use tvdb scraper you cannot use tmdb for episode thumbs as it will become a big fuck up. Episode listing/numbering will differ at times. Fanart.tv does NOT support tmdb numbering so you cannot use tmdb scraper.

Kodi only supports one ID atm so it's either tmdb or tvdb and not both or more.

[rmrector]

Right right, these do make perfect sense as episode 'fanart'. Duh.

The Movie DB API endpoint '/3/tv/:id/season/eason_number/episode/:episode_number/external_ids' does offer a tvdb_id, but yeah, that still would be a pretty convoluted process to get them matched up. I may still take a stab at it, see how it goes, though.

[realcopacetic]

I like this idea; I have been disappointed with the low quality, random, and watermarked thumbs that TheTVDB generally offers.

Ohh hey! It looks like The Movie DB (not just movies anymore!) has a place for episode thumbs, and it takes all sizes (for instance, one from The Walking Dead is 3600x2025).

I have been working on an update for Artwork Downloader, and since there is an API to pull these down I would quite like to make another update that adds support for them. Probably with a new artwork type like 'hqthumb', so 'thumb' can stay at it's lower size for more reasonable uses. Does that sound like something that would be handy?

Sorry, I think I confused things with my poor naming convention. I referred to them as thumbs because I have replaced the Episode.Name-thumb.jpg files with them, but I guess they are probably better categorised as episode fanart.

Given the relatively low standards (especially on TMDB) I was surprised how easy it is to find high-quality stuff, especially for anything on a major network in the last five or so years.

Somehow, I've completely overlooked TMDB as a source for these, thanks for the heads up!

No.
Why would you want that high quality episode thumbs? That would make it regular fanart.

episode "thumb" should stay the same name

I have to admit, I have no idea what the impact of 1080p episode images is from a resource perspective as far as existing skins go, it's probably something that's 95% pointless, I guess it just seemed like the next logical area of focus given how all the other base bits of visual metadata have been upgraded now.

I think these can breathe new life into a lot of skins as well by opening up more views as a viable option for episode lists.

So far I've only done screencaps for one show from an HD but low quality source, and I was surprised how well they came out with a bit of work in PhotoShop. Obviously there will always likely be some big gaps as the assets just don't exist for a lot of major shows, but especially for ongoing stuff from the bigger networks, it's relatively easy to get good stuff.

Right right, these do make perfect sense as episode 'fanart'. Duh.

The Movie DB API endpoint '/3/tv/:id/season/eason_number/episode/:episode_number/external_ids' does offer a tvdb_id, but yeah, that still would be a pretty convoluted process to get them matched up. I may still take a stab at it, see how it goes, though.

I'm interested to see how you get on, good luck

[rmrector]

I hadn't thought to look at TMDB for episode thumbs either, until I saw this post. And whoa, I think the results could be quite nice.

I've modified Artwork Downloader to work with episode fanart, so that they are available to skins just like movies and series, $INFO[Container(100).ListItem.Art(fanart)], if your container has episodes. It can download them automatically for a whole series (the top rated image larger than "minimum fanart size"), and you can also pick specific images for each episode. I've put together a Context item add-on (for Kodi 15) "Download Episode Fanart" for quick access to this in the context menu under "Manage..." for TV series and episodes. If 'Use local files' is enabled then it will use <Episode Filename>-fanart.jpg as the filename. They are ignored in bulk mode and non-gui single item mode, "RunScript(script.artwork.downloader, mediatype=?, dbid=?)", so they don't increase scanning time and to limit API calls to TMDB, as there are probably plenty of TV series that don't have these images.

Kodi passes the series fanart through to skins if the episode fanart hasn't been set. That's probably what a skin would do anyway, but it does seem to mean that they can't tell if the episode has it's own fanart (otherwise display the smaller 'thumb'), not without some extra help from a script.

In AD it's more straight forward than I had thought; it can get TVDB episode IDs from Kodi (if using the TVDB scraper), and then look up episodes on TMDB with that ID. It seems fairly accurate for episodes that we might expect to find these images for. This way the only worry of mismatched episodes is if TMDB doesn't have the right info, and in that case it's easy for any single person to fix for everyone.

Download and install the modified Artwork Downloader, and the Context item add-on, and let me know what you think. It's fresh so there may be bugs, but it's ready to be tinkered with. You may want to back up your video database, just in case.

You've got some great images, would you consider uploading them to TMDB? At least for episodes that don't already have similar images (TMDB has many similar Gotham images, though your episode 2 with Fish stands out). The Walking Dead 5x10 and Breaking Bad 5x03 are particularly impressive.

[Martijn]

I commented on the initial PR for the extrafanart. The idea is good however some parts need to be redone.

[realcopacetic]

I hadn't thought to look at TMDB for episode thumbs either, until I saw this post. And whoa, I think the results could be quite nice.

I've modified Artwork Downloader to work with episode fanart, so that they are available to skins just like movies and series, $INFO[Container(100).ListItem.Art(fanart)], if your container has episodes. It can download them automatically for a whole series (the top rated image larger than "minimum fanart size"), and you can also pick specific images for each episode. I've put together a Context item add-on (for Kodi 15) "Download Episode Fanart" for quick access to this in the context menu under "Manage..." for TV series and episodes. If 'Use local files' is enabled then it will use <Episode Filename>-fanart.jpg as the filename. They are ignored in bulk mode and non-gui single item mode, "RunScript(script.artwork.downloader, mediatype=?, dbid=?)", so they don't increase scanning time and to limit API calls to TMDB, as there are probably plenty of TV series that don't have these images.

Kodi passes the series fanart through to skins if the episode fanart hasn't been set. That's probably what a skin would do anyway, but it does seem to mean that they can't tell if the episode has it's own fanart (otherwise display the smaller 'thumb'), not without some extra help from a script.

In AD it's more straight forward than I had thought; it can get TVDB episode IDs from Kodi (if using the TVDB scraper), and then look up episodes on TMDB with that ID. It seems fairly accurate for episodes that we might expect to find these images for. This way the only worry of mismatched episodes is if TMDB doesn't have the right info, and in that case it's easy for any single person to fix for everyone.

Download and install the modified Artwork Downloader, and the Context item add-on, and let me know what you think. It's fresh so there may be bugs, but it's ready to be tinkered with. You may want to back up your video database, just in case.

You've got some great images, would you consider uploading them to TMDB? At least for episodes that don't already have similar images (TMDB has many similar Gotham images, though your episode 2 with Fish stands out). The Walking Dead 5x10 and Breaking Bad 5x03 are particularly impressive.

I'll have to try this out when I have some free time. And yes, TMDB seems like the place for these, at least for the time being!

[Scott00007]

Is this still being developed?

[rmrector]

The modified Artwork Downloader still works. I would like to get this and a couple of other features into AD proper, but Martijn had some unpleasant shit to deal with and I've taken on more paying work, so that got pushed back. I'd like to get back to it this month, though.

[Scott00007]

Awesome....and understandable.

The modified AD does work...no doubt about that.

Great to hear that this isn't dead.....in a lot of ways it's a much better option than what we currently have, can't wait to see where it goes.

[rmrector]

I have packaged up the first draft of Artwork Beef, which supports episode fanart and some other handy features.