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[rjm]

Just installed 12. Great job! MC is my favorite piece of software and it keeps getting better.

Upgrade experience from 11 to 12 was reasonably smooth with one significant annoyance.

I have a large number of videos for which I carefully created useful thumbnails by pausing at the appropriate point and selecting "Use Screen Grab for Thumbnail". This is a very time consuming process.

When I upgraded to 12 I tried unsuccessfully to have it use my version 11 thumbnail file. It appears 12 wants to rebuild all thumbnails, presumably in a new format. This is not a problem for my audio files since I imbed the artwork inside the mp3s, but is a big deal for video due to the time it will take to manually capture new thumbnails.

I still have a copy of my 11 thumbnail file in case I did something wrong in the upgrade.

Any advice on how to preserve version 11 thumbnails would be appeciated.

[Alex B]

The actual image files on the disk are separate from the more or less temporary thumbnails that MC creates for quick thumbnail display.

If you started with a copy of your MC11.1 library the link data should still be in the library. Check the image file field inside MC12. Do the filename links point to the folder that you used for the captured image files?

MC12 should automatically create new thumbnails from the linked image files. Unfortunately this does not work. I have reported about the bug in the 12.0.76 thread: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=35893.msg244625#msg244625.

I tried to use the "drag and drop into the AW image display window" function, but it seems to be broken as well.

For now, you need to relink the image files with the Image menu tools (Right-click > Image > Remove Cover Art > Right-click > Image > Add From File).

You may want to wait for the fix if you have a lot of video files with external cover art.

[rjm]

Thanks for quick response Alex B.

The field "Image File" in MC11, which points to the captured video artwork, does not appear to exist in MC12.

I tried capturing a thumbnail for a video in MC12 and it still does not create the field "Image File", yet the new thumbnail displays as I captured it.

Something strange going on here...

Thanks for the work around but as you point out will also be very time consuming.

I checked the registry for an option to point MC at a different ScreenGrabs Base Path but no luck here either.

Appears to be a significant bug that needs to be fixed.

[Alex B]

I guess you did not restore an MC11 library? My "Image File" field contents survived, but because this is broken in MC12 the field contents are next to useless.

I tried capturing a thumbnail for a video in MC12 and it still does not create the field "Image File", yet the new thumbnail displays as I captured it.

Since the thumbnails seem to come and go for various reasons this should be fixed as soon as possible.

For example, a library restore makes MC to build thumbnails from the scratch. All captured thumbnails would be lost.

[rjm]

When I first started MC12 it seems to have opened the default MC11 database, which in my case was empty, rather than my main MC11 database which I store in a location that differs from the default. I then opened a copy of my main MC11 database and rebuilt the thumbnails. I did not notice the loss of my video screen capture thumbnails until the thumbnail rebuild was well into the process. Perhaps this is why my "Image File" field is now empty.

Think I will continue to use MC11 until this is fixed.

Thanks for your help Alex B.

[Alex B]

I copied these two posts here. They are both related to video thumbnails and linked image files.

ScreenGrabs are currently stored in C:\Program Files\J River\Media Center 11\Data\ScreenGrabs.

For those of us that capture thumbnails for videos, this data is valuable given the time it takes to create.

ScreenGrabs should default to a folder under the root database directory because:

1) For those of us that backup and/or synchronize our databases across multiple computers, the ScreenGrab data will move with the database when the database root is selected. I just realized that ScreenGrab data is not backed up on my computer because I never thought valuable data would be stored in Program Files.

2) Eliminates dependency on MC version. I am thinking ahead to the day when MC12 comes out of beta and I blow off the MC11 Program Files directory. How will I preserve my ScrenGrab data?  You need to provide a mechanism for moving the ScreenGrab data while preserving the "Image Field" links when upgrading from 11 to 12.

Rob

I upgraded from 11 to 12 and started having this problem.  I have 200 Movies on (2) drives.  The cover art is in every individual folder for each movie and is named folder.jpg.  The problem is that about half of the files do not show the cover art.  This was not a problem in 11.  All of the files had cover art showing. I imported the library from 11.  I also deleted all of the Avi from the library and re-imported them.  Niether way fixed the problem Is any one else having this problem?

[Alex B]

In addition, these older threads are related:

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=35749.0
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=35648.0

And my bug report in the 12.0.76 thread:

When MC builds a thumbnail for a video file it does not use the linked cover art image. The cover art file must be manually relinked to make it display correctly.

and...

In my opinion MC should have separate options for video covers.

The options could be:
- In a specific folder,  [Filename (name)]   (naturally with a different filename extension, e.g. avi --> jpg)
- Next to file,  [Filename (name)]
- Next to file,  Folder.jpg

As I have said before, I think that [Filename (name)] would be better than a tag based naming rule because video tagging is not standardized similarly like audio file tagging.

Also captured video images could use these naming options.

From time to time a name conflict situation might occur. MC is good in adding (1), (2), (3) etc to the filenames when needed. The same systen could be used with video cover art and captured images.

[JONCAT]

Sorry to butt in here; real quick...are we able to create "cover art" for videos (screengrabs) and do we have to do this manually with each as we watch or is there a batch process? I take it the thumbnail by default is the first frame of the video, and is there a way to batch capture the first frame and store in file as we do with Audio albums cover art?

v/r
DC

[sertua]

Has this issue been fixed? I upgraded today to the trial version and my thumbnails weren't preserved.  A library restore from 11.1 didn't do anything.

Thanks for your help.