No Video thumbnails?

[Lexen]

Hey all,

This is my first post.

I downloaded mediaportal about 2 weeks ago and I'm impressed with the possibilities. Mediacenter doesn't allow as much.

I am having trouble with movie thumbnails however. Mediaportal does not create ANY thumbnails for my movies. (and I have over 500 so it should at least be able to create some.) - Mediacenter is able to do it.

I have no trouble with music or picture thumbnails.

Mediaportal is able to playback more movies than media center. Media Center (Vista) sometimes crashes whilst creating thumbnails for one particular folder. (it's always with the same folders, but it's really annoying). I'm hoping Mediaportal is more stable.

Can anybody tell me how I can activate creation of thumbnails?

Thanks a lot in advance,

Lex

[rtv]

unfortunately the process to generate and chose thumbnails needs an imdb movie lookup - which might have issues as well in MP. We're working on it

[Lexen]

RTV,

Thanks. I understand.

But is IMDB the only alternative? So if I make a small movie with my digicam, it will never get a thumbnail in MediaPortal? (unless I make the thumb myself -- I read that's easy).

At least I know I don't have to look any further. Thanks RTV!

[alpax]

Can someone clarify please.
Is there any way to have thumbnails for the videos made from the videos themselves? Any plugin or utility can do this?
This only feature makes me seriously consider switching back to MCE, as I have a big collection of old cartoons for my kids, and it's much easier for them to choose an easily recognizable picture than read all those hundreds of file names.

[rtv]

sorry not that much free time atm but I'll add something there

[alpax]

Originally Posted by rtv

sorry not that much free time atm but I'll add something there

Thank you, rtv! That would be nice.
But for now I have actually found a workaround. That's good that MP at least shows the icons from separate image files, which have the same name as the videos. It was just time consuming for me to create those for all my videos. But while researching this question I found that MPlayer can make a "screenshot" from command line! So I just ran it through all my *.avi files, and got a bunch of corresponding JPEGs! Of course many of them were not quite acceptable as they contained just a randomly chosen frame, but at least it was a good start. Now it needs some more manual work, but the result should be even better than in MCE!

By the way, can I change the size of the icons shown in the Icon View? Currently they are vertically-oriented - designed for DVD-cover images, I guess. But the frame-captures are mostly 4:3, so I would change the icon dimentions the same way. Is it in the skin, or somewhere else? Can you give a clue, what and where to look for please?

[rtv]

1. open BlueTwo\myvideo.xml and myvideoTitle.xml
2. change <import>common.facade.video.xml</import> to "common.facade.pictures"

3. enjoy

[toweno]

Is there a way to make this by folders (*.jpg)? i have the same problems with my child's.

[alpax]

Originally Posted by toweno

Is there a way to make this by folders (*.jpg)? i have the same problems with my child's.

Folders are actually simpler - you just need to create/find one corresponding JPG, rename it to folder.jpg, and put into your video folder. MP will show this image for that folder in the list/icon view.

But you have to do this manually anyway...

[alpax]

BTW, rtv, thank you for the help with the skin (better late, than never ) - that was really easy change, and made my icon view look exactly how I wanted!

Now we only need some automation process, so that MP could grab a frame from each video file and save it as filename.jpg. And if MP could let the user to select, which frame to use as a thumbnail for that video (in the file context menu), that would be awesome, and make this feature ideal.

PS. Oops... I've just realized this thread about video thumbnails is in "Listen Music" group. Why?!? I found it here by the Search, and didn't notice this first.