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Originally Posted by polargeek  I am and my initial thought would be no just because it could possibly be a huge storage and bandwidth addition. |
Image weight is a concern no doubt. It would increase bandwidth a fair bit. Incidentally, is there a donation program for thetvseries to support a possible bandwidth increase?
Keep in mind the fan art should only have to be downloaded once - it would be nice if the tvseries plugin should be smart enough to check when a user requests an online refresh, whether an image has changed. If it hasn't, skip redownloading it - yet still download new or updated art.
An alternative is to automatically generated thumbnails on upload of fanart, and then the tvseries config displays a "browse fanart for this series" displaying the thumbnails. The user would then select the fanart they like, which then downloads and is assigned to a series. That would mean all backgrounds for all series aren't automatically downloaded - only a specific one on request of the user.
It just seems a shame to me that all this great fanart has to be manually added while one of the great strengths of the tvseries plugin is that the banners/coverart are so nicely integrated and accessible via thetvdb online database. If we could come up with a solution to make fanart available in the same way, it would improve the end-user experience greatly.
I'm liking the thumbnails solution above the more I think about it - it reduces bandwidth on the server side, and it reduces download overhead for the enduser too. Otherwise a usage example would be say 20 series x 3 fan art x 600k each ~= 36mb!! With thumbnails that would be reduced to similar sizes as banners with the full resolution fanart only downloaded "on-demand".