Poor coverart quality

[n0idi0n]

Hi all,

LONG STORY:

I've just begun using Mediaportal and am very impressed. I went through and scanned my movie collection, which worked pretty well except for a few completely off-base results with the coverart, but anyways. I noticed right away though that the coverart chosen was always poor quality, but if you manually change it, all the additional images are high resolution. So I went through and manually changed all my 192 movies, but then somehow the db was corrupted, so I rescanned it and again was presented with all the poor resolution images. When I looked in the thumbnails folder, I saw there was a small and large image for each movie, but the large one looks to be a scaled up version of the smaller one. Since I don't think it's just by chance that MP selects the one low res image out of all images available, I am guessing that it starts with a high res image, scales it down to make the smaller thumb, and then scales that one up to make the large one, which of course is of poor quality. Is this correct, and if so, why would it do it this way?

The other mystery is where are the extra (sometimes 20+) images stored that are associated with each movie? I couldn't find them anywhere in the MP folder. Are they downloaded on the fly?

TO THE POINT:

How come MP always uses low res images for movie coverart, but the additional images are all high res? And where are the additional movie coverart images stored?

I couldn't find anything in the forums on this, so maybe it's some weird anomaly with my system.

Hope someone can shed some light on this.

Thanks.

[globaldonkey]

Try the latest SVN. A lot of issues with IMDB and coverart have been resolved since the stable release. I didn't have your db corruption problem, but I certainly noticed that I could select high res coverart images no problem with a later update.

[n0idi0n]

Thanks. I am using a recent svn. Did you have to manually select the high res images, or were they used by default? When I update a movie, it always gives a low res image for the thumbnail to start, but I can then go in and select from a number of other images manually, which are all high res.

[ThaClown]

Originally Posted by n0idi0n

When I update a movie, it always gives a low res image for the thumbnail to start, but I can then go in and select from a number of other images manually, which are all high res.

I have the exact same thing, and really don't want to select all the coverart by hand....

[n0idi0n]

wondering if anyone has an answer for this. I always get low-res art by default. And where are all those extra images stored? Anyone know?

[Maiklas]

There was another thread where people were talking about a problem that the below batch file solves. Now I can't find that thread, so I am posting here instead. If you already have nice high quality DVD covers stored on your hard disk, this will let you stuff them into MediaPortal. BTW, I think this is the single most needed feature in MediaPortal. I went from Vista Media Center to MediaPortal, and it was very sad to go from beautiful DVD covers to blurry ones, and too time-consuming to (re)select a DVD cover for each movie, so I wrote this quick fix.

Installation: Copy the below and paste into notepad, edit the configuration parameters and save to a file called mpfeed.bat, and then double click or execute from a command prompt.

@ECHO OFF
REM mpfeed.bat version 0.2 by Maiklas
REM
REM usage: mpfeed.bat [directory1][,...]
REM
REM This is a DOS batch file to force-feed MediaPortal with your prestored movie cover art.
REM It recursively searches through the whole movie directory structure, which you specify
REM in the optional argument list of directories or else in the default list of directories.
REM There are two naming conventions for cover art:
REM
REM  1. <movie name>.mp.jpg
REM  2. <movie name>\folder.jpg
REM
REM (where <movie name> is the movie name in www.IMDB.com or whatever database you use.)
REM If you use .mp.jpg, the filename will be used for the movie cover art's name.
REM If you use folder.jpg, then the directory name will be used for the movie cover art's name.
REM If both exist, a .mp.jpg file takes precedence over folder.jpg.
REM
REM For example, you might have a video directory structure like this:
REM
REM <DIR> Movies
REM       <DIR> 2001; A Space Odyssey
REM             2001_ A Space Odyssey.mp.jpg
REM             <DIR> VIDEO_TS
REM       <DIR> Monsters, Inc
REM             Monsters, Inc..mp.jpg
REM             <DIR> VIDEO_TS
REM       <DIR> Pay It Forward
REM             folder.jpg
REM             <DIR> VIDEO_TS
REM
REM And then this batch file could be used to force MediaPortal to use (copies of) the
REM .jpg image files for the movie covers.
REM
REM WARNING: This operation is destructive! JPEG files in the MediaPortal thumbs folder
REM will be overwritten. Make a copy of this folder first (THUMBSFOLDER below.) Each new image
REM file will be used for both the large and small thumbnail, which may cause performance problems.
REM
REM Note that the <video name> mentioned above must exactly match the name that MediaPortal uses
REM for the thumb image file. (See your backup copy of the thumbs folder that you just made.)
REM See the above examples to see how to handle names ending in periods (Monsters, Inc.) and
REM names with colons (2001: A Space Odyssey). 
REM
REM Note that you must edit the parameters below to fit your system configuration!
REM
REM ******** BEGIN USER MODIFIABLE PARAMETERS **********************
REM
REM LIBRARY is a list of directories to recursively search for movie cover art
SET LIBRARY=C:\Users\Public\Videos
REM
REM THUMBSFOLDER is where Media Portal stores video thumbnails
SET THUMBSFOLDER=C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\Thumbs\Videos\Title
REM
REM More parameters, but you can probably leave these alone...
SET IMAGEFILE=folder.jpg
SET TEMP=C:\Temp\mpfeed
SET MP=mp
SET JPG=jpg
REM
REM ******* END OF USER MODIFIABLE PARAMETERS ********************
REM
IF NOT EXIST "%TEMP%" MKDIR "%TEMP%"
REM
REM Handle optional argument, which overrides default LIBRARY...
IF "%1"=="" GOTO :LOOP2
SET NEWLIBRARY=
:LOOP1
IF "%1"=="" GOTO :ENDLOOP1
SET NEWLIBRARY=%NEWLIBRARY%,%1
SHIFT
GOTO LOOP1
:ENDLOOP1
SET LIBRARY=%NEWLIBRARY%
REM Now LIBRARY is a list of the command line arguments
:LOOP2
FOR /F "tokens=1-1* delims=, " %%i in ("%LIBRARY%") do (SET DIRECTORY=%%i
SET REST=%%j)
SET LIBRARY=%REST%
REM Case 1: *.mp.jpg exists
ECHO Copying .%MP%.%JPG% files from %DIRECTORY%
REM Search directory tree and copy *.mp.jpg to TEMP while removing .jpg extension.
FOR /R "%DIRECTORY%" %%F IN (*.%MP%.%JPG%) DO COPY "%%F" "%TEMP%\%%~nF" /Y
REM Copy all to thumbs folder while changing extension from .mp to .jpg
FOR %%F IN ("%TEMP%\*.%MP%") DO COPY "%%F" "%THUMBSFOLDER%\%%~nF.%JPG%" /Y
REM Move all to thumbs folder while adding "L" to name and changing extension from .mp to .jpg.
FOR %%F IN ("%TEMP%\*.%MP%") DO MOVE /Y "%%F" "%THUMBSFOLDER%\%%~nFL.%JPG%"
REM
REM Case 2: Image filename is folder.jpg (%IMAGEFILE%)
ECHO Copying folder.jpg files from %DIRECTORY%
REM Search the directory tree at Library, and for each directory, if there does not exist a .mp.jpg file
REM and there does exist a folder.jpg file, then copy it to the thumbs folder, while changing the name
REM to match the directory name.
FOR /D /R "%DIRECTORY%" %%D IN (*.*) DO IF NOT EXIST "%%D\*.%MP%.%JPG%" IF EXIST "%%D\%IMAGEFILE%" COPY "%%D\%IMAGEFILE%" "%THUMBSFOLDER%\%%~nxD.%JPG%" /Y
REM Now do this again, except add "L" to the end of the name.
FOR /D /R "%DIRECTORY%" %%D IN (*.*) DO IF NOT EXIST "%%D\*.%MP%.%JPG%" IF EXIST "%%D\%IMAGEFILE%" COPY "%%D\%IMAGEFILE%" "%THUMBSFOLDER%\%%~nxDL.%JPG%" /Y
REM
REM Repeat for next argument
IF DEFINED LIBRARY GOTO LOOP2
REM Cleanup
RMDIR "%TEMP%"
ECHO Done.
PAUSE
REM
REM End of code.

[jburnette]

It may also be possible that your settings in General -> Thumbnails is set too low for your display. I really don't know if that affects the movie thumbs, but I would imagine it does.

[Herbs28]

I'm being annoyed by the same issue... Thumbnail settings don't seem to make a difference. There must be a simple way round it.

[Maiklas]

My thumbnail settings are set to the best ("Very Large TFTs, projectors"), and the result is what you see on the left below.

Here is the "before" and "after" running mpfeed.bat:



(You can click on the images to see the full filmstrip screens.)

I updated mpfeed.bat (in a post above) to allow the use of the extension .mp.jpg to denote which images are to be used for MediaPortal covers. This has some advantages over the folder.jpg approach.

[piranha]

It has been fixed in latest SVN.