[Axel Foley]

Hello, I'm replacing AD and found this wonderful addon.

Questions/Suggestions:

1. I use Universal Movie Scraper, in the latest versions it provides functions to download extra artwork. Should I disable these functions if I use this addon? I guess it doesn't make sense having both turned on.
2. I decided to delete all artwork files downloaded by AD. I used a bash script for that. It would have been very helpful for people who migrate from AD if there was a sort of "migration" feature that deletes all old files or renames them.
3. In the documentation, it would be really nice if you could explain all the options in settings. Many are pretty clear, othere are not. An explanation with advices would be good for newbies of this great addon.
4. I also decided to delete all artwork in the db by using the addon. Really good that you can choose subcategories (movies, series, music, etc.) but in my case I was looking for "All video", "All music", instead of going one by one.
5. While deleting, and waiting for the process to be completed, I noticed the upper right progress notification disappeared, so I thought it was completed and I launched anothere delete for another category, and when I did, 2 progress notifications appeared the previous one was not completed so the two where running in parallel. Is this by design? Does it slowdown the overal process?
6. For my main Kodi installation (I have a central NAS for all media which also hosts a central MySQL) I turned automatic mode on and download locally the artwork files. On other Kodis in other rooms, should I turn off automatic mode etc.? I guess they will use the cached files, right?

Thanks a lot for your great work.

[Axel Foley]

I think there's a small bug, AB gives an error on this movie: https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/10867-mal-na

Here's the log:

== 2018-02-13 01:20:07: Processing movie 'Malèna'
Missing artwork: fanart, poster, clearlogo, landscape, discart, banner, clearart
No artwork updated
Encountered an error - Could not save image to file: nfs://nas.axel.dom/volume1/video/Movies [ita]/Malena [2000, Giuseppe Tornatore]/fanart.jpg

I highlighted in red what I think the issue is: the character 'è' gets converted in 'e'. So the path does not exist.
The correct path should be nfs://nas.axel.dom/volume1/video/Movies [ita]/Malèna [2000, Giuseppe Tornatore]/

Hope this helps.

[Axel Foley]

Properly refresh items when the Kodi library is wiped and rebuilt. This prevents the wrong artwork for movie sets that @badaas encountered, but only for items added and updated after this version is installed. Anyone that currently has such mismatched movie set artwork, you MUST take a few steps to fix this:

1. under "Program Add-ons" run "Artwork Beef", then select "Quick fix: Reset all movie set IDs"
   
2. run "Artwork Beef" again, select "Remove specific type of artwork for ...", then "Sets ...", then "all: ####"
   
3. run "Artwork Beef" one last time and select "add missing artwork for new items" (Beef will consider them new because they aren't in its private database)
   

 

I just followed your advice because I had issues with movie sets that were all UNMATCHED, and it seemed strange to me because the collection names were identical to TMDB ones (I double-checked all of them).
So I guessed it was something related to the db, and I followed your guide. But even after those 3 steps, after the 3rd one, here's what I see in the logs:

== 2018-02-13 17:21:21: Processing list automatically
2107 items in list - movie: 1, set: 290, episode: 1816

The sets are identified, artwork should already be present in the central directory (this is how I configured it when I installed it the first time), but when I check the library I see empty/default icon.
If I check if they are matched, using the specific function of AB, they are ALL still unmatched. Strange also that if I do a Select Artwork on each set, I am actually able to select artwork for that set, so that means it is actually matched. I also tried Add Artwork from context menu, and it works too. Obviously, I'd like to avoid this manual process for all sets, and I'd also like to understand why it doesn't load all artwork and reports all sets as unmatched.

A suggestion: while debugging this problem, I had to go back and forth to check the log that is under settings. It would be good if you could also put the check log in the menu of functions when AB is launched manually via addons/programs.
​​​​
Thanks again for your great work and support on this, it is a great addon.

[MB1968]

I upgraded the Android version on my Beelink tv box from version 6 (Marshmellow) to 7 (Nougat) yesterday. A good moment to rebuild my libraries and to start with Artwork Beef.

However the path/mounting point to my external usb hard drive (where my movies and tv shows are stored), has been changed on Android 7. And I thinks this causes problems for Artwork Beef. Artwork Beef 17.3~adev refuses to download all missing images.
The path on Android version 6 was:
/mnt/media_rw/....

On Android 7:
/storage/....

This is the error I found in the Artworks Beef's logfile:

Encountered an error - Could not save image to file: /storage/28D07E9FD07E7344/001 Video/002 Series/Attenborough's Passion Projects (2016)/season01-banner.jpg

Artwork Beef stopped immediately after this error. Any idea how to fix this? Thanks in advance.

Regards

[rmrector]

@Axel Foley 
1. Not a bad idea, if you disable all fanart.tv options it may save a duplicate request to fanart.tv (per movie) between the scraper and Artwork Beef.
2. No. No need to delete a bunch of files when migrating. I don't want to encourage folks to throw away all their perfectly good artwork to download fresh gigs from free providers.
3. Which options aren't clear? Describing all options would just make the documentation even larger and more likely that someone will miss some info they need.
4. I'll probably expand on that in time.
5. Kodi seems to be dropping that background progress dialog when it runs very long, I can't seem to do anything about it from the add-on. It wasn't intended to run two at a time.
6. Automatic only on one Kodi, as noted in the First usage documentation.

I'll need a debug log for the error.

Artwork Beef must process all items in the library, and when you reset all movie set IDs it has to process them all again. That looks like reasonable output for step 3. The process halts on a file system error with the movie, which could cause the sets to stay unmatched.

@MB1968 I'll need a debug log to investigate this error.

[Kolabor]

@smitchell6879 If you are on Leia, a recent scraper update adds basic collection artwork (poster as "set", fanart as "setfanart") to each movie in the database rather than the movie collection, then Artwork Beef downloads that if configured. Upcoming changes to Leia core should apply them to the movie collection as expected.

Thanks and I am using Leia after reading this I have started re-scraping my entire library which in turn everything is working just as you stated and the artwork is also being copied to a centralized location. Thanks again.. awesome add-on cant wait to get my music organized and give that a shoot. Also just a pointer to anyone using this... I will assume that you enjoy your artwork so remember to add this to your advancedsettings.xml to get the best resolution for your artwork that kodi will allow.

xml:


<advancedsettings>

     <imageres>1080</imageres>

     <fanartres>1080</fanartres>

</advancedsettings>

 

 Well 1080 is not enough for 4K displays. I created topic for that. Kodi should let us decide wheter we want rezised fanart or 1:1 copy scraped from any service.

[smitchell6879]

@Kolabor 
I just realized that was a option and figured most people didn't know, so I was sharing it because default is way less. As far as using 4k kodi maxes out at 1080 that snippet of code gives you the best that kodi will allow at the moment.

[Kolabor]

@smitchell6879 
Defaults are 1080 for fanart and 720 for imageres if I remember correctly.

[Axel Foley]

@Axel Foley 
1. Not a bad idea, if you disable all fanart.tv options it may save a duplicate request to fanart.tv (per movie) between the scraper and Artwork Beef.
2. No. No need to delete a bunch of files when migrating. I don't want to encourage folks to throw away all their perfectly good artwork to download fresh gigs from free providers.
3. Which options aren't clear? Describing all options would just make the documentation even larger and more likely that someone will miss some info they need.
4. I'll probably expand on that in time.
5. Kodi seems to be dropping that background progress dialog when it runs very long, I can't seem to do anything about it from the add-on. It wasn't intended to run two at a time.
6. Automatic only on one Kodi, as noted in the First usage documentation.

I'll need a debug log for the error.

Artwork Beef must process all items in the library, and when you reset all movie set IDs it has to process them all again. That looks like reasonable output for step 3. The process halts on a file system error with the movie, which could cause the sets to stay unmatched.

@MB1968 I'll need a debug log to investigate this error.

 3. In order to fully understand the logic of AB and the options, I had to go through all the pages of this thread to find your changelog posts in which you nicely comment why you introduced some options, sometimes responding to a user suggestion or feedback. It would be good for new users to have those comments in the documentation of the addon. Just a suggestion.
5. Since this notification issue seems to be related to Kodi more than the addon, could you check and prevent having tasks run two times? 
6. Here's the debug log for the fs error. https://pastebin.ubuntu.com/p/JdQMRG5y43/ - the name of the movie is 'Malèna' but the nfs action is on nfs://nas.axel.dom/volume1/video/Movies [ita]/Malena [2000, Giuseppe Tornatore]/

Regarding the sets: so the overall update process of new items could stop because of the fs error on that single movie? Didn't think about that. But AB does identify the sets, and I can see them in the Unmatched list. And if I update a single set via context menu function "Add Artwork" it downloads artwork perfectly and it removes that set from the unmatched list. Well, probably it didn't complete the process because of that fs error...could be. I'll try to fix it by renaming that directory to 'Malena' instead of 'Malèna', and see what happens.

UPDATE: I removed the movie from the library, and restarted AB for new items: it correctly processed all sets, and after that, it scanned all TV series episodes, tasks that it didn't complete before. So the nfs error was the issue.
Now, I told Kodi to update the library, it found the movie 'Malèna', it got scraped, but then same AB error: it looks for the directory '/Malena' instead of '/Malèna' and can't find it. I don't know if it's an AB problem or the scraper that writes in the DB the wrong path converting the 'è' with an 'e'. I remember though that when I used AD it had no issue scraping artwork and writing it to the filesystem.

Thanks for your answers, your support is greatly appreciated.

[rmrector]

I can work with #3.

Is this movie the only one you have with an accented character in the folder name? Do you know what happened at line 723 in your log (that was another "failed to open" for the same movie, but not from AB)? Can you play the movie from Kodi? Does the path in the Kodi GUI show the accented character as you expect (in Estuary open the info dialog and focus the "Refresh" button)?

[Axel Foley]

I can work with #3.

Is this movie the only one you have with an accented character in the folder name? Do you know what happened at line 723 in your log (that was another "failed to open" for the same movie, but not from AB)? Can you play the movie from Kodi? Does the path in the Kodi GUI show the accented character as you expect (in Estuary open the info dialog and focus the "Refresh" button)?

 I followed your suggestion and noticed I had a couple of other movies with accented characters in the title. So I removed all of them (three in total) from library, cleaned the library, then I rescraped them. The only one who gave me problems was Malèna. That meant there was no issue on the scraper or AB side.

So I digged deeper into this, went into the db tables after the rescrape: the movies table, column c22 contains the path to the movie. Malèna always contained the path name "nfs://nas.axel.dom/volume1/video/Movies [ita]/Malèna [2000, Giuseppe Tornatore]/", correctly, with the accented character. The movie_view instead contained the same c22 column (with the accented char) but the strPath column with "nfs://nas.axel.dom/volume1/video/Movies [ita]/Malena [2000, Giuseppe Tornatore]/", without the accented char.

I then went to the path table, that contains the path to the movies, and found out three entries for that movie (rescraped 2-3 times during the years) and there were two orphan entries, one of them didn't contain the accented char. For some reason, it was always used during the rescrape phase. Hence why the strPath in movie_view was always wrong. I deleted those orphan records (strHash empty) and rescraped Malèna. Everything ok now.

Thanks for the help in debugging this.

[redglory]

I can work with #3.

Is this movie the only one you have with an accented character in the folder name? Do you know what happened at line 723 in your log (that was another "failed to open" for the same movie, but not from AB)? Can you play the movie from Kodi? Does the path in the Kodi GUI show the accented character as you expect (in Estuary open the info dialog and focus the "Refresh" button)?

 I followed your suggestion and noticed I had a couple of other movies with accented characters in the title. So I removed all of them (three in total) from library, cleaned the library, then I rescraped them. The only one who gave me problems was Malèna. That meant there was no issue on the scraper or AB side.

So I digged deeper into this, went into the db tables after the rescrape: the movies table, column c22 contains the path to the movie. Malèna always contained the path name "nfs://nas.axel.dom/volume1/video/Movies [ita]/Malèna [2000, Giuseppe Tornatore]/", correctly, with the accented character. The movie_view instead contained the same c22 column (with the accented char) but the strPath column with "nfs://nas.axel.dom/volume1/video/Movies [ita]/Malena [2000, Giuseppe Tornatore]/", without the accented char.

I then went to the path table, that contains the path to the movies, and found out three entries for that movie (rescraped 2-3 times during the years) and there were two orphan entries, one of them didn't contain the accented char. For some reason, it was always used during the rescrape phase. Hence why the strPath in movie_view was always wrong. I deleted those orphan records (strHash empty) and rescraped Malèna. Everything ok now.

Thanks for the help in debugging this.   

NFS shares don't go along with accented names

Had the same problem in the past

[Axel Foley]

NFS shares don't go along with accented names

Had the same problem in the past 

Like I wrote in my post: the accented chars were not the issue. It was old orphan records in the path table causing the issue.
Don't know exactly how "strPath" is built in Kodi, but it always pulled info from an old orphan record in path table in which the real path to the movie was wrong.

I have 3-4 movies with accented chars in the title, and they were working fine, except this single one.

[Streggi]

Quick question - do you think you'll ever build in support for animated posters?

[manfeed]

@rmrector

Only want let you know that your work is highly appreciated, already enjoying it while working in my new mod, especially what have to do with spine and thumbback for albums. It's such a pity that something similar doesn't exists for movies... hopefully some fanart website starts adding those kinds in the future, but I wouldn't hold high hopes in that...

Thank you!