Thumbnails - where are they stored (1 Viewer)

Anthony Vaughan

MP Donator
  • Premium Supporter
  • June 25, 2015
    566
    292
    Home Country
    United Kingdom United Kingdom
    I had to move my MediaPortal TV Server to a different machine and, since then, Thumbnails are not being produced although my settings are the same as they were before.

    I am using version 1.20.0.

    Strangely, a few videos do have thumbnails showing and I can't understand why they should be visible for some videos and not all the others.

    Where should I look to try to work this out?

    Also, can I force MediaPortal to recreate thumbnails for all existing videos?

    Thank you in advance.
     
    Last edited:

    Anthony Vaughan

    MP Donator
  • Premium Supporter
  • June 25, 2015
    566
    292
    Home Country
    United Kingdom United Kingdom
    Okay. I think I have got to the bottom of this.

    I installed 1.20.0 on another machine as a single seat installation and there were no thumbnails.

    So, I installed 1.18.0 and the thumbnails appeared. I then installed 1.19.0 and again got thumbnails.

    Installed 1.20.0, and no thumbnails.

    Would you please check to see whether the thumbnail link is broken in 1.20.0?

    I will go back to 1.19.0 on my production machine.
     

    CyberSimian

    Test Group
  • Team MediaPortal
  • June 10, 2013
    2,849
    1,770
    Southampton
    Home Country
    United Kingdom United Kingdom
    Thumbnails are a bit of a puzzle. With the settings that I use, "TV Server" creates a thumbnail in the "Recorded TV" folder whenever a recording completes. However, "TV Server" also creates a thumbnail in another folder, somewhere in the "TV Server" folder tree (in "ProgramData" I think, but it might be "Program Files"). When I view the "Recorded TV" panel, I see thumbnails, but I don't know which one is being used.

    Once a week I move recordings from "Recorded TV" to "Videos", and I move the thumbnail too. When I view the "Videos" panel, I see those thumbnails.

    What is puzzling is that the thumbnails in the "TV Server" folder never seem to be deleted, so the folder just gets bigger and bigger (it was about 2GB when I first noticed it). Puzzling. :confused:

    -- from CyberSimian in the UK
     

    Anthony Vaughan

    MP Donator
  • Premium Supporter
  • June 25, 2015
    566
    292
    Home Country
    United Kingdom United Kingdom
    Hello CyberSimian

    Good to hear from you again.

    I am now certain that this problem lies in the 1.20.0 client installation.

    I have tested both 1.19.0 and 1.20.0 with one as the TV Server and the other version as the client, on my development machine, and the 1.20.0 TV Server is irrelevant. But when the 1.19.0 client is installed the thumbnails work as expected but that is not so when the 1.20.0 client is installed. I tried doing this because the previous problem I had with DVR file navigation seems to have been fixed in 1.20.0 and I wanted to see if I could keep that fix. Sadly, I will have to revert completely to 1.19.0 because the thumbnail issue is more important to me than the DVR issue.

    If you could get a fix for this to me I can test it for you.

    I have been doing some delving into thumbnails to try to work out what was going on and have worked out the following (I think):
    • Thumbnails seem to be able to go to three possible locations:
      • C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\thumbs\Videos\Title:
        • This folder contains Film thumbnails - named after the film title.
      • C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\thumbs\Videos\<a number>;
        • This folder contains thumbnails named as follows - <a number>.jpg e.g. 2610829593.jpg. I think this technique enables MediaPortal to keep track of the thumbnails even when a video is moved or renamed. So, you shouldn't need to move you thumbnails when you move the video.
      • c:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal TV Server\thumbs;
        • This folder contains thumbnails named after the show recorded.
    Are you setting the "Leave a thumb in video folder" option ON? If so, you do need to move the those thumbnails together with the video when you move a video. However, the default behaviour should work as I described above, without the need to move thumbnails around later. Everything should be self-maintaining, I believe, by default. I think the behaviour I described above has broken in the 1.20.0 client.

    Please let me know when you have found out what happened.

    Thanks.

    Tony
     

    CyberSimian

    Test Group
  • Team MediaPortal
  • June 10, 2013
    2,849
    1,770
    Southampton
    Home Country
    United Kingdom United Kingdom
    I am now certain that this problem lies in the 1.20.0 client installation.
    Thumbnail processing is not an area of MP that I know much about. However, I have just been comparing MP 1.20f with MP 1.18f, and there does seem to have been a change. I am cautious about this, as there are various settings, various folders, and various things that may have happened in the past. These are my observations:

    (1) I looked at some recent recordings made using MP 1.18, and tested using the "DefaultWideHD" skin on a single-seat system.

    (2) The "Recorded TV" panel using the list layout has a small thumbnail to the left of each item in the list, while on the right side of the panel there is a large thumbnail for the item that has the focus.

    (3) In MP 1.18f, the small thumbnail is the channel logo, and the large thumbnail is a frame grab taken from the recording (assuming that the item with the focus is not a folder). :)

    (4) In MP 1.20f, the small thumbnail is the channel logo, but the large thumbnail is also the channel logo. :eek:

    (5) The "Titan" skin behaves the same as "DefaultWideHD", so this does not look to be a change in the skin.

    This change in behaviour will need to be looked at by one of the @Developers to determine the cause.

    -- from CyberSimian in the UK
     

    regeszter

    Retired Team Member
  • Premium Supporter
  • October 29, 2005
    5,335
    4,954
    Home Country
    Hungary Hungary
    It works here in 1.20.
    Képkivágás.PNG
     

    Anthony Vaughan

    MP Donator
  • Premium Supporter
  • June 25, 2015
    566
    292
    Home Country
    United Kingdom United Kingdom
    The only place I can find where thumbnails work in 1.20.0 is for Films. I don't know if this is dependent upon specifying the folder containing the films as a "Dedicated movie folder". Anyway, in this case, the images are stored in "C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\thumbs\Videos\Title", or for TV/Video where you have specified "Leave a thumb in video folder", in c:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal TV Server\thumbs;.

    This is not the behaviour that I experience for versions prior to 1.20.0. For example, when I am running 1.19.0, and don't specify "Leave a thumb in video folder" and don't even perform a scan, ordinary videos get thumbnails when you go into any folder containing videos and there are any new videos in the folder. So far as I know, you don't have to do anything else to get this to work.

    I have found this difference in behaviour to be repeatable and consistent when comparing 1.19.0 to 1.20.0. I also tried completely removing MediaPortal from the machine and reinstalling it with the same result.

    CyberSimian: I agree that this doesn't seem to be skin related as the same happens independent of the skin used. I hope you have luck with the developers in identifying what is going on.

    Tony
     

    joecrow

    Test Group
  • Team MediaPortal
  • August 9, 2012
    2,528
    1,879
    Home Country
    Germany Germany
    (4) In MP 1.20f, the small thumbnail is the channel logo, but the large thumbnail is also the channel logo. :eek:

    I decided to check this out on my 1.20f install as I could not recall not having the large thumbnail with a frame grab, after resuming from sleep sure enough some though not all the large thumbnails in RecordedTV were showing the channel logo:oops:. BUT after scrolling down the list and returning to the start all the large thumbnails had changed and were now showing the frame grab:).
    So it seems to be working albeit with a small delay.:unsure:
     

    regeszter

    Retired Team Member
  • Premium Supporter
  • October 29, 2005
    5,335
    4,954
    Home Country
    Hungary Hungary
    Can someone explain this issue?

    • Is this issue in My Video or TvPlugin -> Recorded TV
     

    CyberSimian

    Test Group
  • Team MediaPortal
  • June 10, 2013
    2,849
    1,770
    Southampton
    Home Country
    United Kingdom United Kingdom
    It works here in 1.20.
    I also tried completely removing MediaPortal from the machine and reinstalling it with the same result.
    So it seems to be working albeit with a small delay.:unsure:
    As I mentioned in my previous post:

    (a) Thumbnail processing is not an area of MP that I know much about.
    (b) There are various settings, various folders, and various things that may have happened in the past.

    I have been thinking about what I did this morning, looking for the clue that will solve this puzzle. To cut a long story short, I think that in my case the problem is caused by using TV Server's "Import recordings".

    I have just tried a short recording using MP 1.20f, and after the recording had finished, the "Recorded TV" panel showed the channel logo for the small thumbnail, and a frame grab for the large thumbnail. This is in accordance with the results from @regeszter and @joecrow . (y)

    But this morning I used "Import recordings" to import into my test system the recordings that exist in my production system (the test and production systems share the same capture drive). None of these recordings have a frame grab as the large thumbnail -- they all show the channel logo. :( This suggests that "Import recordings" does not create a frame-grab thumbnail when a recording is imported (possibly for reasons of performance, if a large number is imported). An alternative explanation might be that it does create a frame-grab thumbnail, but it incorrectly sets a flag in the databse to indicate that no thumbnail exists.

    I am not sure whether this explains Tony's case. Whenever I have updated MP to a newer release, I think that MP must preserve the databases and thumbnails. But if you uninstall MP, and then re-install it, MP will be starting with an empty database, and when you "import recordings", you won't get any thumbnails. The same would be true if you moved the MP server to a different system.

    Does any of this seem like the correct explanation? I have not considered "Videos" here, so there might be a separate problem with them.

    -- from CyberSimian in the UK
     

    Users who are viewing this thread

    Top Bottom