[thebertster]

Hope you're well. I have found another problem with the skin scraping incorrect artwork similar to the problem I reported a month or so ago. In this case, the problem occurs on the OSD info panel when playing back a TV show episode from the library. In the bottom panel at the left, it normally displays the TV show series poster. However, if the episode's title happens to correspond to the name of a different TV show (which happens surprisingly often!), the skin is scraping the poster for that TV show and displaying that in the OSD info panel instead.

Hmmm, strange. First of all it shouldn't scrape for any art if you have that already in your library so maybe the helper "thinks" there is no artwork available.
Secondly, it should always use the tvshow's title for lookups and never the episode title...

A few questions:

1) Does the issue still exist with the latest updates from last days ?
2) Do you have the skin setting "enable lookups for addons" enabled ?
3) You are using local media files and not some (illegal) addon ?
4) Do you start the playback from the video library ?

Hi Marcel,

Apologies for the delay in replying. I only noticed the problem over Christmas, but it's possible it was happening for a while and I just didn't notice as it only seems to happen in the OSD and you also need to have an episode whose title happens to be the same as a TV show which, while more common than you might have thought, is still only a tiny fraction of episodes.

1) Yes, was still happening on both my Kodi installs (one is a generic Linux install, the other is OSMC on a Raspberry Pi) using the latest skin and scripts from your repo...however, see below!
2) The "Enable lookups for addons" option is disabled.
3) These are all local media files. As I've mentioned, I do all the metadata scraping offline using Media Companion. There is a full compliment of artwork, including the "all seasons", "specials" and default posters. Also banners, clear art, landscape, extrafanart the lot. There should be no need whatsoever for Titan/Skin Helper to scrape anything from the Internet except for the extra data like next aired which is dynamic. As I say, the correct local image is displayed initially, but then gets replaced with the incorrect one after a few seconds and you can see this in the debug log.
4) Playback is started from browsing the library TV Shows -> Show -> Season -> Episode as normal, not using any remote control app or anything.

I then built a completely fresh Kodi install on a new PC (Windows PC this time), installed only the Titan skin and its dependencies from your repo and copied just a couple of problematic shows/episodes into the local kodi/media folder and scraped (using the "Local information only" scraper). I didn't change any other Kodi or skin settings from the defaults. In this install, the OSD still shows scraped artwork from TVDB but it is showing a poster from the TV show in question rather than the incorrect "episode title" poster, but it is a different poster from the one I have stored locally. This is still undesirable as I don't want it ever to scrape images from the Internet when there is a perfectly good poster image already present locally that I have specifically chosen (I have a poster.jpg, seasonXX-poster.jpg, season-all-poster.jpg which as I say are all used as expected elsewhere in the skin).

I then went back to my two original installs and deleted the Thumbnails folder and texture cache database. One of the installs then seemed to start behaving as expected (artwork correct in OSD) while the other was still showing the "episode title" artwork. I then deleted the simplecache.db from both of these installs and they both started behaving like the fresh Windows install (showing "incorrect" artwork but at least the poster from the correct show, not the weird "episode title"-based artwork).

Going back to the Windows install and deleting simplecache.db and texture cache and restarting multiple times, I found sometimes it would show the correct local poster in the OSD and sometimes a scraped poster (but from the correct show). Further testing showed it was only simplecache.db that was relevant. Once the incorrect poster had been scraped, it was always displayed across Kodi restarts unless the simplecache.db was deleted. After deleting simplecache.db, it seems to be random as to whether the wrong poster is immediately scraped or not, but after a bit more testing, eventually the wrong poster does get scraped, and from that point on is always displayed (for all episodes of that show) until simplecache.db is deleted again. I've browsed through the contents of simplecache.db and was amazed to see how much data is being pulled in from various sources on the Internet. I can see that the "incorrect" poster is pulled from the URL listed in this key in simplecache.db, for example:

artutils.get_tvdb_details.tt1132290. {'DurationAndRuntimeExtended': u'0:45 (45 Minutes)', 'rating': 8.4, 'art': {'fanart': u'http://thetvdb.com/banners/fanart/original/84676-7.jpg', 'poster': u'http://thetvdb.com/banners/posters/84676-2.jpg'...

The same URL is also referenced in a number of other simplecache.db entries:

thetvdb.get_data.series/84676/images/query?keytype=fanart&subkey=graphical
thetvdb.get_series_fanarts.84676
thetvdb.get_data.series/84676/images/query?keytype=poster
thetvdb.get_series_posters.84676
thetvdb.get_series.84676

So it looks like something has been fixed in a recent update as I did all of the above previously and still always got the bogus "episode title" artwork, but now the remaining problem where it seems to scrape a poster unnecessarily seems to be intermittent - perhaps a timing/race condition issue?

Thanks,
Roberto