Image Problems (1 Viewer)

[leftfield]

When Moving Pictures first added images for my movies it seemed to have a problem with about one in four. They looked like the attached image.

I manually went through and fixed them all as most films had two or three pictures so there was always an alternative I could select. I didn't think too much of it at the time.

Now I've upgraded from Beta 2 to Beta 3, all images have reverted BACK to the original defaults and with the same problems. I suspect it may happen again and again unless I understand the cause now.

I could with knowing:

1. Why are the images doing this? Is it something to do with the conversion from PNG to JPG? Have I shut the program down midway through or something? If so, how do I get it to start again? How do I avoid doing the same thing again in the future?
2. Why have all the images gone after the upgrade? Will this always happen when the software is upgraded?

Thanks

 

[fforde]

Image Downloading Bug
All versions of Moving Pictures prior to 1.0 Beta 3 had some problems with downloading images when the connection between your computer and the server hosting the image was not very good. This did not necessarily have anything to do with your connection speed or the server itself, it had more to do with how the connection was routed across the internet. Basically though an image would download halfway, the connection would drop and Moving Pictures (or more specifically the Windows GDI graphics library) just saved the partially downloaded image as is, creating the file you attached. This issue is now fixed in Beta 3, if a connection is dropped while downloading an image Moving Pictures will simply reconnect and continue from where it left off. So the bad image files you are seeing are leftovers from a previous version.

PNG Files are Bad Bug
There was also a new issue introduced in Moving Pictures 1.0 Beta 2. For a very long time MediaPortal cached all PNG files in the thumbs folder. A bug in MediaPortal to be sure that will be fixed in the next release of MediaPortal. I, not being aware of this bug, made a misguided change to save all artwork as PNG files starting with Moving Pictures Beta 2. This of course caused some major problems with skin caching, in some cases resulting in a crash of MediaPortal. So Beta 3 will rename all your artwork files when you upgrade, your artwork will be preserved but the side affect is that if you have specifically selected a cover, it will still be available but may not be the selected cover anymore after 1.0 Beta 3. This was an oversight on our part and we feel very bad about this.:sorry: This was a one time process though so it will never happen again.

Solution
So what you are seeing is a combination of the above factors. you had bad image files because of a the first bug, and they were reverted back to the selected cover because of the second bug. So here is what I recommend you do.

1. Shutdown MediaPortal and the MediaPortal config.
2. Open up your thumbs folder (you can get to this by clicking the "User Files" shortcut on the Start menu under MediaPortal).
3. Navigate to thumbs\MovingPictures\Covers\FullSize.
4. Switch the Windows Explorer mode to Thumbnails view.
5. Ctrl-Click all files that are partially downloaded (this should be easy to verify from the thumbnails), and delete them.
6. Restart MediaPortal and let the background artwork manager run through your files. This is a process that runs on startup automatically, so just give it a few minutes after opening the Moving Pictures configuration screen. After a few minutes, all your movies should be populated with quality covers.

I am very sorry for the trouble leftfield. Honestly though this is one of the main reasons we have not released Moving Pictures 1.0 Stable yet. Moving Pictures 1.0 still has a few nasty bugs hidden in there that we are trying to squash. Hope this helps.

 

[leftfield]

Thanks for the quick answer.

If I didn't mind starting from scratch with the images, if I delete them ALL from the Backdrops & Cover folders they will all be downloaded again, is that right?

 

[fforde]

Yep, if you delete the thumbs\MovingPictures\ folder all new artwork will be downloaded in the background on restart. This is done one image at a time though to reduce resource consumption (since it's a background task) so give it a little bit of time.