2013-12-14, 23:47
One of the things we try to do with our media collection is to keep as complete a set of metadata and artwork files as possible. Usually this is done by using tools like Media Center Master, Ember or even XBMCs built in scrapers.
The challenge is that actor images aren’t always available at the time they are scraped. This is a problem for XBMC given that unless it knows of the location of a link to the image it will forever leave the image blank unless you ‘refresh’ or rescrape the movie or show the actor is in.
Media browser tackled this differently by always checking for the art from its ImagesbyName/People folder. On the other hand, it did not have a way of storing the actor images with the movie/show, in the way XBMC supports using the .Actors folder.
So, to try and update all the actors I had images for, in all the movies I created this new tool. It attempts to harvest as many actor images as it can from both XBMC .Actors folders and Media browser ImagesByName/People folder and pull them together into a new central storage area. Once they are all gathered together you can update all of the .Actors folders in your video library or update the Media Browser ImagesByName/People folders.
However, it does have one final trick up its sleeve. I have included an option to update the actors table within the XBMC MyVideosXX.DB so you can point it directly at the central storage area. It does this by updating all the thumb paths within the Actors Table, and pointing them at the new location. The benefit of this is that even if the actor image does not exist at the time you update the table , as long as it has an entry in the table you can add the image later and XBMC will automatically cache it when it becomes available.
The tool is broken into three main sets of functions:
Harvesting Options,
Download XBMC Tools - Actors Bulk Update
History
1.0 First Release.
The challenge is that actor images aren’t always available at the time they are scraped. This is a problem for XBMC given that unless it knows of the location of a link to the image it will forever leave the image blank unless you ‘refresh’ or rescrape the movie or show the actor is in.
Media browser tackled this differently by always checking for the art from its ImagesbyName/People folder. On the other hand, it did not have a way of storing the actor images with the movie/show, in the way XBMC supports using the .Actors folder.
So, to try and update all the actors I had images for, in all the movies I created this new tool. It attempts to harvest as many actor images as it can from both XBMC .Actors folders and Media browser ImagesByName/People folder and pull them together into a new central storage area. Once they are all gathered together you can update all of the .Actors folders in your video library or update the Media Browser ImagesByName/People folders.
However, it does have one final trick up its sleeve. I have included an option to update the actors table within the XBMC MyVideosXX.DB so you can point it directly at the central storage area. It does this by updating all the thumb paths within the Actors Table, and pointing them at the new location. The benefit of this is that even if the actor image does not exist at the time you update the table , as long as it has an entry in the table you can add the image later and XBMC will automatically cache it when it becomes available.
The tool is broken into three main sets of functions:
Harvesting Options,
- ◾Harvest ImagesByName, this recursively checks the Media browser ImagesByName/People folder for actors and copies them to a central library.
- ◾Harvest .Actors Folder, this option recursively walks through the path you set containing your movie/shows looking for any .Actors folders. When found, copies them to a central library.
- ◾Update .Actors Folders, recursively checks all the movie/shows .NFO files within selected videos path, checks for a .Actors folder in the same path as the .NFO, compares the actors contained in the .NFO with those in the .actors folder, if any are missing , cross check the central library and if any are found , copy them to the .Actors folder in the same path as the .NFO.
- ◾Update ImagesByName, similar to the Update .Actors folders in that it checks the cross references the files found in the central store with the folders held in ImagesByName/People. If it exists in the central store and not the ImagesByName/People folder, it copies it over.
- ◾Update Actors Table, will update all of the thumbnail paths to actors found in the actors table of XBMC to the central storage folder. This will ensure that XBMC will always look for the Actor file on that path if it exists or not. This has the benefit of XBMC not needing to rescrape its metadata when the actor image eventually is added to the central storage folder. XBMC in this case will simply cache it as normal. Warning, this could affect the performance of your XBMC is you have a lot of missing actors if your central storage area is on the network.
- ◾Delete Textures.DB, this will delete the XBMC textures database forcing XBMC to try and re-cache all the artwork and images. Warning this is a fairly serious option to tick and can mean that XBMC will re-scrape everything. Not so bad if its local metadata, painful if its from one of the online sources.
- ◾Delete Thumbnails Folder, this will delete the XBMC thumbails cache. This should ONLY be used in conjunction with the Delete Textures.DB option. Otherwise you will wind up with the cache folder and its referening TEXTURES.DB database out of sync.
Download XBMC Tools - Actors Bulk Update
History
1.0 First Release.
