[Wintermute0110]

I don't fully understand how to use the online and offline scrappers right now but with 0.9.7 mentioning a Launchbox offline scraper maybe someone can tell me how far off I am with following scenario:

There are 2 kinds of scrapers: Metadata and Artwork. Offline scrapers only apply to Metadata: a Metadata scraper can be Online of Offline. The equivalent Offline scraper for Artwork is to search for local available images.

AEL incorporates a more-or-less comprehensive database with Metadata of thousands of ROMs for many platforms. You can have a look to the database here. The database is still incomplete and I an improving it over time (I also expect the users to contribute to this database. In AEL 0.9.8 I will change the offline scraper database so everybody can contribute to the database by editing XML files). This database can be used to scrape metadata for ROMs.

The scrapers can be used by the ROM Scanner or via the Launcher/ROM context menu. Note that at the moment only the ROM Scanner can do batch scraping. With the context menu you can only scrape individual Launchers or ROMs.

It is very important to set the correct settings for the scrapers to operate as you wish. Scraper settings are located in AEL Settings, "ROM Scanner" and "ROM Scraping" tabs. In "ROM Scanner" tab the main settings are:

"Ignore Scrapped Titles (use ROM filenames instead)" If OFF the ROM title will be the scraper title. If ON, the scraped title will be ignore and the ROM title will be the ROM filename without the extension. For correctly renamed No-Intro/Redump sets I recommed to keep this option ON. For MAME ROMs this option must be OFF. MAME ROMs have special short names (for example, "dino" filename becomes "Cadillacs and Dinosaurs").

"Metadata scan policy"

1. "None" No metadata scraping is done.
   
2. "NFO Files" Metadata is read from ROM NFO files.
   
3. "NFO Files + Scrapers" Metadata is read from ROM NFO files. If the NFO file is not found, then ROM is metadata is scraped.
   
4. "Scrapers" NFO files are ignored and ROM is scraped.
   

"Asset scan policy"

1. "Local Images" For every asset, local images are searched. This is the recommended option (you download artwork packs, place them in the correct directories and AEL will use them).
   
2. "Local Images + Scrapers" For every asset, local images are searched. If not found, then image are scraped online.
   
3. "Scrapers" Local images are ignored and all images are scraped online. This option is never recommended.
   

After setting the correct scraping policies, you can choose the scrapers you want to use in the "ROM scraping" tab.

Finally: I always recommend to download as many artwork packs as possible and use the online scrapers (both metadata and artwork) only when necessary. You have several links to places where you can download this artwork packs in the first post. For example: suppose you have a complete No-Intro MegaDrive collection (about 1,500 ROMs0 and you create a Retroarch launcher to play them. If you use the Offline scraper and have the artwork as local images the ROM Scanner will take about 30 seconds to scan all the ROMs. Scraping Metadata and Artwork for 1,500 images online can take as long as 10/20 hours or even more. Let's suppose that you spend one hour registering to Emumovies/Hyperspin forum and downloading the artwork packs. It's clear what you should do, in my opinion.

I like to use Launchbox to build my game library with all the assets and meta automatically taken care off very hassle free by the LB client. I would also like to use that offline game library inside AEL so that I can have a nice all in one launcher for my Kodi centric media center PC.
Is this something that might be doable in the future or is the focus only on scraping from the LB database directly but not importing offline LB libraries?

In any case that would be a neat feature in my opinion.

Note that I have never used Launchbox so maybe what I say is not totally right. I think it is perfectly OK to share artwork between several fron-ends. Just make sure that for every launcher both front ends use the same artwork directories for every asset type.

Regarding metadata... this could be more problematic. AEL can export the ROMs metadata from its internal database to NFO files. Those NFO files can be read by another frontend but I don't know if Launchbox may read NFO files, or if the format of AEL and Launchbox NFO files is the same. On the other hand, if Launchbox can export ROM metadata into NFO files then I may consider adding support for AEL to read Launchbox NFO files, in addition to AEL NFO file format.