[AnalogKid]

Hello everyone. I've just started using XBMC on my Windows Vista based PC and I think it's great. However, I have a few basic questions that I hope you don't mind me asking.

1. After adding TV shows to XBMC and pulling down metadata from TVDB using XBMC's scrapers, thumbnails appear when browsing the episodes. These appear rather low quality when compared to other bits of fan art that XBMC retrieves from the internet. Is there anything I can do to improve the quality? The screenshot below demonstrates the thumbnails I am referring to.



2. I have a cheap, no brand IR remote control. Is there anyway I can somehow use this with XBMC? It would sure beat a keyboard.



3. What are all the applications such as Ember Media Manager, Media Info Plus and Media Companion for? Don't they do the same thing as the XBMC scrapers?

Thanks very much for reading and I look forward to reading your answers.

Regards.

The images to which you're referring are the movie / TV show stills / episode thumbs. Generally, these are not of the highest quality - you're quite correct.
There a number of reasons for this:

a) The original source material (the tv show) is usually only Tv quality in the first place, and so screen grabs from there are also quite poor.

b) The thumbs are are literally supposed to be quite small... but SOME skins like AEON are displaying them zoomed (larger than intended).

c) The users who upload the thumbs / shots to thetvdb.com use a lot of jpeg compression reducing the quality even further.


However, you CAN create your own images.... read the online manual on 'thumbnails'. If you can get higher quality stills, or if you want to use some other artwork, you can do this very easily.

Incidentally, 80% of fanart and season thumbs (the dvd case covers) are pretty good quality... it's just the episode thumbs that aren't. That said 20% aren't great... because ultimately they are created by end users, some of whom clearly aren't fussy about quality, or it's an obscure movie / tv show and it's difficult to get hires artwork for it.

Hope this helps you understand some of the reasons.

Whatever you think thought, please don't think it's an XBMC issue... it definitely isn't, it's just the the quality of art being scraped!