Hi again @
black_eagle
Once again, thanks very much for your assistance, I’m really happy with my now almost complete set up.
I’ve followed your very helpful suggestion to consider using a 3rd party media manager, and I’m pleased to report I have had great results and I see clearly how such a set up gives me much more control over the outcome than using Emby or Plex to manage my metadata.
I also understand now I never even needed an Emby/Plex server, given that my Mac will serve to my Shield via SMB 2/3 anyway.
An overview of how my set-up now is:
* I’ve abandoned Emby server
* I’m not using Kodi on the Mac as a server either (just using Kodi there to scrape the ratings), I’m just connecting my Mac to my shield with SMB3.
* Scraping the ratings on the Mac Kodi version worked beautifully (aside for a few (maybe 1%) discrepancies in metadata, but they’re easily sorted out using Picard)
* I’ve started using MediaElch to view/edit my metadata, it works really well! No more unanticipated Emby rescans of metadata/images I’ve already set, I imagine I’ll not need to edit these files again.
* Kodi on my Shield is flying along, and only has 0.5 Gb of storage used, so I’m imagining most/all of the imagery is actually on my Mac, and that’s how I like it.
I really think I’m all set!
The only question I have left if you would be kind enough to indulge me is what the following entries in the various updated album NFO’s (created by Kodi on the Mac) are:
* <thumb spoof="" cache="" aspect="thumb" preview="http://assets.fanart.tv/preview……
I’m almost certain they are links that Kodi (client on my Shield) will use to load imagery on the fly when I call up the album.
If true, I presume that on the fly loading is happening instead of referencing any previously scraped imagery on my (server) Mac. Is that the case, and if so, is my (small, 16Gb) internal storage on my (client) Shield at risk of filling up through repeated use of this feature?
I ask because I think I might prefer to organise my (mostly already downloaded artwork) with MediaElch on my (server) Mac instead of the (client) Shield doing things on the fly…. My reasoning: desire to keep the Shield cache as lean as possible, speed of loading the data on the Shield (quicker across the LAN than from Australia to a server in the US), and just because I could then see all the images in MediaElch for future edits.
If any of the above makes sense, I’m wondering if it is prudent/possible to ensure the NFO’s don’t get the thumb/spoof entries in them (again an assumption, this one being the spoof entries override local network image reading, I understand that might be incorrect).
Hopefully the above reasoning/questions isn’t too off beam, and I’m really happy to be corrected. I’ve tried to do searches on the spoof entries but didn’t find much, except for entries in the context of writing scrapers.
Thanks again, I appreciate your assistance and patience. I believe I’m pretty set now, I’m really happy, thanks.
Cheers.