TV Banners - Automation Question

Hi,

I have recently discovered the Alaska Revisited skin for my new Dharma installation of XBMC and have noticed that TV banners seem to be handled differently to the way they were in the past or with other skins. Is this to accommodate an upcoming change in the TVDB scraper that will automatically put a banner.jpg file into each show directory, or is this a personal/deliberate choice by the skin developer?

My past skins all seemed to use the inbuilt Thumbnails/.tbn files for the banners that are generated from TVDB scraper downloads, and because it just worked I'd never really thought about managing them any other way.

I had a look through the scraper settings and couldn't see anything that would allow it to automatically save the banner picture to banner.jpg in the series directory. Am I missing something?

If it cannot be set to use the internal banner storage system, and the scraper cannot save a banner.jpg file can someone recommend a third party bit of software that can automate this for me or am I stuck grabbing each one manually? I'll now go and hunt through the Supplemental Tools section to see what I can find.

Thanks,

Zesh

Combined Banner, Landscape and Poster support -
Have the scraper set to download Posters.
Download the Banner and Landscape images from TVdb and save them to each TV Show folder naming them banner.jpg and landscape.jpg respectively. I recommend resizing the landscape images to 408x230 to prevent slowdown.

XBMC can't do this and I don't think there is a third party tool either. Gotta do it by hand.

But your not sure why it has been done this way in this skin? Was it the only way multiple images could be used for the same show for different views? How hard would it be to override this by pointing the skin xml file back to the thumbnail cache, even it it destroys whichever view uses landscape.jpg?

After looking through the Viewtype xml's I see it has been hardcoded into Viewtype_Banner.xml and Viewtype_Landscape.xml. I would have thought Viewtype_Banner.xml would be left using the thumbnail cache method since it was already impelemtnted.

I am going to look into making Viewtype_Banner.xml default to using the thumbnail cache while Viewtype_Landscape.xml still has the setting to use landscape.jpg, so that banners are nice and automated, but if I ever decided to use the landscape view I could still manually go and get those image files? Will start tinkering and see how I go.

On your skin 'Night' are you using the thumbnail cache for TV banners or the banner.jpg method as well?

Zesh

I know regular Alaska uses the cached banner not banner.jpg. Alaska Revisted is Hitcher's personal version so it bends the rules a little. Alaska regular is more of a default XBMC skin.

Yes Night uses the regular cached banner.

Thanks for the insight.

Zesh

Have modified it to support my preferences in support of my continued laziness by using the thumbnail cache. One change to one line in one file.

Thanks for this skin, it looks fantastic.

Zesh

Zesh Wrote:Was it the only way multiple images could be used for the same show for different views?

There's the reason.

If you change your mind and want to go back to using Posters or Landscape views you don't have to delete your cache and start rescanning all your shows. Also it allows multiple users to have their own view types.

Makes sense. Thanks for the follow up.

Zesh

Made a quick little util to download banner.jpg's from tvdb.
http://code.google.com/p/tvdbclidownloader/
Nothing fancy.

Thanks ErlendSB. Giving it a shot now.

Zesh