[Skopin]

Hi everyone,

I'm having an issue getting cover images to show using XBMC. For the majority of my movies and TV series, I get nothing. Oddly, some of them display without issue, even though they are all formatted and named the same. Each movie is in its own folder, with the cover image named poster.jpg. Each TV show is also in its own folder, also with the cover image named poster.jpg.

If I go into the movie or TV show information, and select choose art, the correct posters are showing up in the current art box, but they don't actually show up when viewing the normal menu. If I choose one of the random sources, it works. Oddly enough, if I open the locally saved poster.jpg, and save it as poster.png, I am able to use that as the cover.

I'm at a bit of a loss, because I don't want to have to manually select cover art for every movie, TV show, and season of those shows in my library. Any help is greatly appreciated! Let me know if I need to provide more info.

I am seeing this issue regardless of the skin I use, including Confluence.

[helta]

From the wiki:

3 Thumbnails for individual items in a single directory

Name the icon file the same as the file you would like it to display for with a -poster.jpg or -poster.png extension ie: Transformers.avi, Transformers-poster.jpg. This is particularly useful for using custom thumbnails for movies.

Example:

Movies\path\moviename.avi
Movies\path\moviename-poster.(jpg/png)
Movies\path\moviename.jpg

4 Folder Thumbnails

If you store each of your media files in separate subfolders to keep things organized, you can also make the folder have a custom thumbnail image. To do this you either need to save your JPG/PNG thumbnail as folder.jpg and place it inside your movie/album folder, or you can save it as <foldername>deprecated and place it at the same level as the folder in the directory tree.

* Remember, XBMC first checks for <foldername>.jpg before checking for folder.jpg.
* Some documentation suggests that folder.jpg can be used. In general folder.jpg is superior as it is detected during a scan, i.e. XBMC will correctly use folder.jpg but not folder.jpg.
* Note that folder.jpg must be named .jpg, even if it is a .png format image.


Examples:

Movies\path\foldername\
Movies\path\foldername.jpg

or

Movies\path\moviename\folder.jpg
Music\path\album\folder.jpg

[Skopin]

Thanks for the quick reply, but I'm still confused as to why some of the covers and fanart display without issue, while others don't. They are all formatted and named exactly the same.

For the first two movies, it looks like this:

F:\Movies\42\poster.jpg
F:\Movies\300\poster.jpg

The art displays fine for 300, but not for 42.

[helta]

are you using a scraper? what are the chances the exact same image pulled from the scraper that is in your poster.jpg?

[Skopin]

I'm not using a scraper as far as I know. I also have Media Browser 3, which I've had for a while, and that's where most of my images have come from.

[black_eagle]

Ha, sometimes I get this issue. MediaElch downloads and correctly names all the art I want, Gotham scrapes all the local info correctly and yet, some of the art is invariably missing.

What I have found is that is I turn off all the external sources in artwork downloader's configuration and just leave local info set, and then run it, it finds and inserts all the missing art.

This works by either getting the context menu up and choosing get art (solo mode) or running artwork downloader from programs.

I know this is maybe a long winded way of going about things, but it prevents me getting foreign clearart/logo's which used to happen a lot, or stuffing up any of the custom artwork I have (which is a fair bit).

[Skopin]

The strange part is that even I go in and manually select the poster.jpg file through the TV/Movie Information screen, it still doesn't show up. If I rename it to poster.png, then select it the same, it does.

[black_eagle]

Hmmm.... poster.jpg works for me, although png is probably a better format. Perhaps a debug log (wiki) of you trying to add a poster.jpg to a movie would reveal something

[Glorious1]

Have you tried refreshing the library by source/folder? If you have all local images and data, it shouldn't take long.
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Upd...ing_videos

Or you might look into deleting the texture cache file, but I'm not sure what it takes to rebuild that or it just happens automatically.

Finally, is it possible some of your images are bad files? Maybe some are actually png's that are named as jpg's?

[Skopin]

Yea, I've tried refreshing several times. I don't think there are any bad files, but I could be wrong. It's just strange that it would be so many of them.

[Glorious1]

Here's an experiment you could try. Copy one of your functioning posters into a folder of a movie that has a nonfunctioning poster, replacing the nonfunctioning one. Refresh that movie and see if the poster shows up. If it does, that would suggest something is up with the files that XBMC doesn't like.

Otherwise I would look at a) cleaning the database if you haven't, and b) rebuild the texture cache file.

[Skopin]

So apparently, XBMC just doesn't like the poster.jpg filename. I renamed a few of those to moviename-poster.jpg, and they work fine. I guess I've got some work to do changing all of them to match that format. Oh well. Thanks for the help, everyone! Much appreciated.

[Glorious1]

Well, as you said, poster.jpg worked for some but not for all. So there is something screwy going on. I have about 200 movies, all posters named poster.jpg, and no problem. Interesting.

I suspect changing the name is adding a new record in the texture cache, and it is being read then correctly. Some of your posters probably have corrupted entries in the texture cache. So it's not one kind of name is better than another, but just creating a new cache entry. That's why changing it to png also worked.

It would probably be easier and faster to delete your Textures13.db and Thumbnails folder and let it rebuild, rather than leaving all the corrupt entries behind.