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[Mans]

Great day Yaobing, MC users,

I'm recently noticing the thumbnails for my TV recordings aren't representing anylonger the timepoint which I've set for it.
It seems the cover art is now generated by an online service, a webpage link is found in each 'image' tag.
When removing the 'incorrect' cover art on those recordings the correct cover art is created immediately after.

I did verified another time my thumbnail settings on the server, but everything seems correct, capture TV recording has a value of 300 secs under it as point of capture.

All other cover art and thumbnails are still correct and as wanted.

Any clue ?

PS I've updated yesterday from (v24) .40 to .45 but same behaviour.

Thanks in advance.

[tzr916]

Do not try updating cover art on a client, ever. It will just keep reverting back.
ONLY set the cover art on the Server. Once it's sorted on the Server, go to the Client shut down MC, wait a minute, then delete everything in:
C:\Users\Me\AppData\Roaming\J River\Media Center 24\Thumbnails\
Restart MC on the Client, this forces the client to get the correct/new thumbnails from the Server.

[Mans]

Greatday Tzr916 and others,

Thanks for your reaction,

I never update or change anything onto the Clients.
All 3 clients does run exclusively in Theater View.

I log-in, via RDP, into the Server and do any changes there.

In meanwhile i haven't found what's causing the get the wrong sort of Thumbnail and why only on TV Recordings.
I've checked your suggestion aswell and cleared the local folder and restarted every client, but no solution.

As mentioned this happens to every new TV Recording.
The only way is to get the thumbnail capture (at 300secs) is deleting the initial cover art (on the server).

I've got 'Also store image in the file's tag' ticked aswell.

Anyone an idea or hint where the search/check ?

Thanks.

[Yaobing]

The images probably were obtained by "Get Movie & TV Info..." which may have been running in the background.

[tzr916]

Are you talking about thumbnails or cover art?

I've never tried to create a custom thumbnail for a tv show, not even sure how one would do it. MC grabs the thumbnail from the video itself. There are several settings for thumbnails, type "thumbnail" into the search at the bottom of Tools > Options. In there, you can tell MC to NOT create thumbnails for videos. Guess that would apply to Tv as well.

Cover art is a completely different deal, changing the cover art is certainly do-able, and is separate from thumbnails. I do that frequently.

[Mans]

Thanks Yaobing,

The images probably were obtained by "Get Movie & TV Info..." which may have been running in the background.

Yes it looks like, but i don't have any clue how such was instructed and why this keeps happening.
Since some days I've been noticing this.

Thanks Tzr916,

I've never tried to create a custom thumbnail for a TV show, not even sure how one would do it. MC grabs the thumbnail from the video itself. There are several settings for thumbnails, type "thumbnail" into the search at the bottom of Tools > Options. In there, you can tell MC to NOT create thumbnails for videos. Guess that would apply to TV as well.

Correct, the auto capture worked till a while ago, i don't do custom thumbnail neither. But due some reason it's probably 'getting Movie & TV info' like Yaobing also mentioned.

Anyone an idea how to stop or check the process of 'Getting Movie & TV info' ?
I've stopped, cleared and rebooted all Clients as also the Server. This without any change.
I still need to manually delete the 'Cover Art' on new TV Recordings, 'Cover Art' like it's named within the action pane.
Once deleted it will automatically capture the correct image of each recording (at 300 secs setting).

Thanks to all for your help,

[Yaobing]

Is TV Recording folder being watched for auto-import?  Do not let MC watch the folder.

[Mans]

Thanks Yaobing, no the TV Recordings folder isn't listed into my Auto-Import list.

Looking at the source of the wrongly attached thumbnail, within tags, it seems some weblink is been used.
EPG ?
Only after manual removing of this link the correct 'capture' will be showed.

Any suggestion or clue ?

Thanks !

[tzr916]

Looking at the source of the wrongly attached thumbnail, within tags, it seems some weblink is been used.

Please describe - How are you doing this?

[Yaobing]

EPG ?

Well, that is a possibility.  Depending on the EPG source you use, each program may have images associated with it.  I would imagine images from EPG source should be correct.

[RoderickGI]

An Image Tag on a Client is always shown as a URL (weblink). See example in the attached image. The example I have used will never get a Cover Art image via the "Get Movie & TV Info..." function as it has no record on TheTVDB. It is just the News. Besides, if a recording had received Cover Art via the "Get Movie & TV Info..." function an image would show in the Image Tag, along with a reference to where the image is coming from.

The Image Tag usually shows a reference to the Cover Art, not the Thumbnail. If the file does have Cover Art, it will also show the image. The exception seems to be when a Thumbnail is captured from a TV recording or video, where no Cover Art is stored, and only a Thumbnail is referenced. In my case, because I record in the JTV format, the Image Tag reference on the server just points to the JTV file.

CLARIFICATION: I just added a second image for the same TV recording file as the first, but displaying the Image Tag field on the MC Server. No image is displayed as it only has a Thumbnail, no Cover Art, and the Image Tag reference points to the recording JTV file, as below. So in these cases of using a captured image as a Thumbnail for a recording, no image is shown in the Image Tag on the Server, but an image is shown in the Image Tag on the Client, because that image is being served from the MC Server.

There is no way to check a reference to a Thumbnail, which is usually just a smaller, actually one of several smaller, versions of the Cover Art image. All Thumbnails are stored in a single file which is indexed for speed of retrieval.


So, a few things then:
1. If you are connecting to the server via RDP and are still seeing a URL (weblink) that includes "MCWS" as part of the address in the Image Tag, whether an image is shown in there or not, then I think you are still connecting to the server as a Client. You are doing something wrong when you RDP to the server, and actually connecting to a Client.

2. Via the right-click options, Remove Cover Art doesn't remove a Thumbnail if it has been captured from a video frame. That makes sense, as there is no Cover Art, just a Thumbnail. Rebuild Thumbnail will refresh a Thumbnail from a video. I tested that by changing the point at which a Thumbnail is captured from the video. (i.e. I changed the time from 600 to 650 seconds.) You can't directly delete the reference in the Image tag. So how are you removing the incorrect Cover Art?

3. The time position at which a Thumbnail is taken from a TV recording is from the start of the file, and therefore you need to take into account any padding in the recording rule. For example, I have five minutes of padding at the beginning of the example file I used above, and on other recording rules I have ten minutes padding. So I have to pick a time to capture the Thumbnail beyond ten minutes, or some Thumbnails would come from previous programs or commercials before the program. Have you added padding time to your recording rules recently?

4. I didn't think that any EPG data included an image Thumbnail for any of the standard EPG sources. But then I don't use the standard EPG sources. So Yaobing, if the EPG data includes a URL reference to Cover Art, does MC actually use that reference for Cover Art and save the reference into the Image Tag? If so, and that is an external URL, that would slow MC down quite a bit I would think. Although only when the actual Cover Art image is being used, rather than a generated Thumbnail. What EPG source are you using?



So pick a recording example that you haven't fixed yet and post a screen capture like I have that shows the full URL to the Cover Art. Hover your mouse over the URL to make it fully display if necessary before taking the screenshot. I think that would answer most questions.

[tzr916]

I don't ever assign Cover Art to a single tv show. I only assign Cover Art to the SERIES. MC takes a screen capture from the video for every tv show, which ends up being the thumbnail. I could honestly care less what the thumbnails are for each show within a Series.

This works for all but 15 out of 492 recorded tv files. On those 15 shows, a jpg file somehow ends up in my recorded tv folder. I don't mind that, just wondering why those 15? All of them have always had Cover Art for the Series. When browsing withing MC, I cannot see any visible difference from these 15 vs all the others. They all look like screen captures.

[RoderickGI]

Isn't it great that MC allows such flexibility?

Some Series have great artwork for each Episode, so I nearly always get them using the "Get Movie & TV Info..." function. It is all part of the experience.

[Mans]

Greatday to all of you,

Many thanks for these reactions,

RoderickGI,
- yes I've recently extended the time on the TV Recordings capture towards 300 secs.
I've made it longer to make sure the capture is on the actual show and not earlier.
To my memory this is the only adaption I've made.

Yaobing,
- I'm using XMLTV together with WebGrab+ which gives me a very good result on Belgian EPG.

The capturing did always it's job, recently the thumbnail gets it's info from an online http source, the CanalDigital page, which is my Sat provider.

On older (correct) thumbnails i find indeed a MCWS link. This i can check via the tag window -> image.

The removal is manually done by selecting the latest recordings and right click 'Remove Art Cover' and voila the capture runs and becomes visible as thumbnail.

Thanks to all for your help, my quesion still remains how is the http thumbnail issued instead of the default capture, as it did before ?

I'm verifying each setting again, but can't find any reference which is off.

Thanks again !

[Yaobing]

Yaobing,
- I'm using XMLTV together with WebGrab+ which gives me a very good result on Belgian EPG.

You may want to examine the XMLTV file produced by WebGrab+.  MC uses image data found in the XMLTV file.  Look for "icon" and "src" in the xml file. The data (usually an URL) is saved in the "Image File" tag for each program entry.  When a program is recorded to disk, MC downloads the image file from the internet and saves the file locally (and changes the corresponding "Image File" entry for the recorded show).

Thanks to all for your help, my quesion still remains how is the http thumbnail issued instead of the default capture, as it did before ?

The following change was made in MC22.0.107 (5/16/2017)

6. NEW: If an EPG program contains an image file URL, MC will download and save the image locally after recording the program.

[Mans]

BINGO !
Thanks Yaobing, exactly as you're describing sir:
On some EPG programs inside the XML guide there's a 'icon src' jpeg file.
And exactly on those recordings which causes faulty or missing thumbnails.

How to avoid such ? Or where inside MC to set this in order to continue capuring the recording for all files ?

Also I'm not sure why this is showing up all this sudden.
As the change in MC was already done a long time ago, you're mentioning MC22.

Thanks another time !

[Yaobing]

There is no good way of avoiding this.  I made the changes with assumption that the images provided by EPG sources would be better than the live capture images since the latter can be "hit and miss" no matter what timing you set it to.

The issue shows up for you only recently because, I guess, WebGrab+ recently decided to include some of these images.

[Mans]

OK thanks Yaobing,

I'll look how to adjust WebGrab+ on this matter.

Thanks for the help and pointing me out what's causing this thumbnail behaviour.

 

[Mans]

Great day gents,

Update, i did found the issue which caused the missing thumbnails for TV Recordings:
The structure of the weblink, which was created by my XLMTV provider (WebGrab+) wasn't updated towards the EPG service.
So the format was missing some bits in order to grab the picture.

Since my correction these thumbnails are correct and visible into MC as well.

-As i want as much as possible details into each file/folder (safety), I've ticked "Also store image in the file's tag ", but due to some reason the copy isn't made.

Any idea ?

[Yaobing]

-As i want as much as possible details into each file/folder (safety), I've ticked "Also store image in the file's tag ", but due to some reason the copy isn't made.

Any idea ?

If the image is from EPG, it should be in "Image File" tag.  If it is generated by grabbing a frame from the video, I don't know.  We might have ignored the setting "Also save..."

[Mans]

Great day Yaobing,

Thanks for your reaction and help,
I did double checked the "Also save..." behaviour for TV Recordings.

I'm noticing it's opposite.
When the EPG image is missing and MC needs to capture from file, then the image tag is also saved outside the library.
But when it's directly coming by EPG it's not saved at the file.

Is there a way to save the image file tag when created by EPG also ?
Maybe I'm missing some setting or rule ?

Thanks !

[Yaobing]

I think both you and I might have misunderstood the meaning of "Also store image in the file's tag" option.  Its true meaning I believe is to store a cover  art image in the actual file.  For example the image can be stored in an mp3 audio file's image tag and becomes part of the file.  You can not do that for TV recordings because both JTV and TS formats do not support tag writing.

[Mans]

Ha thanks Yaobing,

I'm recording into TS.

I've done some further testing on this aswell,

-When the EPG can't provides an image and so MC makes a capture for it, it's visible as image tag and also saved into the Recording folder aswell. Due to "also save into ..."

-When the EPG does supply the tag image, a copy isn't saved into the recordings folder.

Thanks for your feedback sir.