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JStream or JLake - hey, it's not JRiver

MultiChannelRatings (could be abbreviated somehow...)

EZRatings or EZUpdater - boring, but to the point

Keep MCRatings - plenty of tools starting with MC out there

Other - please let me know

[zybex]

Edit: please get sample Post-processing script from the v3.1 announcement:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,124516.msg866064.html#msg866064

Hi,
I've just published MCRatings v3.0, with the following changes:

• Poster support!
• Poster Browser to view and select posters, view Crew&Cast
• Poster tooltip with current/updated posters
• Crew/Cast thumbnail download
• Customizable poster/thumbnail post-processing
• Cell content locking to prevent future changes
• Statistics

The original v1 announcement is here.

Links: Screenshots - Quick Start - User Guide - Source code
Download: latest version

[arcspin]

Thank you so much!
This is such great news.

A donation has been made in your name to the Human Fund.
(Classic Seinfeld quote)

I made an PayPal donation the minute a read your update message.
GREAT WORK!


Ok, a couple of questions.
"This can be useful to prevent your movie disks/NAS from spinning up to load the poster while you are browsing movies in JRiver."
Q: Where would be the best place to store the posters, will my NAS not spin up if I save the posters on a folder on my NAS or should I choose a folder on a separate HDD?
Q: If i choose to save the poster in their respective movie folder, will that some how slow down my browsing movies with JRiver?


This is what I have been waiting for:
"Save actor/crew thumbnails to this folder - Set this option and enter a folder location to enable downloading actor/crew profile thumbnails for each movie when you do Get Movie Info. These thumbnails can be used on JRiver's Theater View and Movie Tooltips (see JRiver's Interact forum for details)"
Q: Can someone point me to the correct thread, this will for sure involve some expression skills that I surely do not have.
Q: Where would be the best place to store actor/crew thumbnails, on my NAS or on a different HDD, like
"C:\Users\arcsp\AppData\Roaming\J River\Media Center 25\" or
"C:\Program Files\J River\Media Center 25\Data"


I would like to do this right from the beginning so I don't have to make changes later.

//arcspin

[zybex]

Arcspin,
Thank you for your donation, and welcome to a select group of gentlehumans

Q: If i choose to save the poster in their respective movie folder, will that some how slow down my browsing movies with JRiver?

This is the default JRiver behavior - next to each movie file, you'll see the corresponding poster as a JPG file. So if you use this option in MCRatings it will just keep doing what JRiver does. For setups like mine where I have all the movies in a NAS, what this causes is a delay of 10-15 seconds when I start using JRiver to browse movies, because it's waiting for the NAS to wakeup and spin up the disks. This is just for the first movie/tooltip but it's still annoying sometimes as JRiver just freezes waiting for the NAS response. Also, sometimes I don't even want to play anything so I'm waking up the NAS for nothing.
The alternative provided by MCRatings - saving all posters to a defined folder - avoids this. Personally I still like to have a copy of the poster next to the movie too, so I select both the "save posters to folder xxxx" and the "also save to the movie folder". This keeps 2 copies of the poster, but the "official" one for JRiver is the Common folder one.

Q: Where would be the best place to store the posters, will my NAS not spin up if I save the posters on a folder on my NAS or should I choose a folder on a separate HDD?

Some considerations for selecting a folder location:
- obviously, not on the NAS - it would still have to wake up.
- I have my HTPC connected to my TV - it's always on, has an SSD, and it runs the JRiver server. This is the best place for me
- Keep in mind that the path you use needs to be accessible by JRiver. I have the JRiver server, but I also use JRiver clients on other laptops/machines. If I set the folder to "C:\Posters" on the HTPC, this will work on that machine but not on the others as "C:\Posters" won't exist there. So the proper way to do it is to share the c:\posters folder on the HTPC and then use something like "\\HTPC\Posters" as the poster folder. Make sure share/folder permissions allow the share to be accessed by other machines on your LAN, and written to by MCRatings.

Q: Can someone point me to the correct thread, this will for sure involve some expression skills that I surely do not have.

Err, well, I was thinking of this thread where you're also active. Moe and Lepa seem to be the experts

Q: Where would be the best place to store actor/crew thumbnails, on my NAS or on a different HDD

The same considerations apply as above - if you're using JRiver server+clients, you'll need to use a shared folder.
Other considerations:
- the easiest folder to use if you have a single JRiver install (no clients) is the Tooltip folder. I suggest this path:
C:\Program Files\J River\Media Center 26\Data\Tooltip\Actors
(or the "Program Files (x86)" variant if you use JRiver 32bit)
- the path above can be easily referenced in JRiver Expressions. If you have a picture there called "Keanu Reeves.png", you can reference it with:

Code: [Select]

<img src="tooltip:Actors\Keanu Reeves" width="100">
Note the "png" extension is gone.
- you'll need to create an expression that translates the movie's "Actors" field content into a list of the corresponding <img> tags. I think the other thread referenced above has examples on how to do that, and Lepa/Moe can help further.
- to allow MCRatings to write to that folder, you'll have to reset its permissions (right-click, properties, security, add "everyone/full access" to the folder permissions)

If you have multiple JRiver clients though... it gets trickier. For the same reason I explained above for the posters, the Actors folder needs to be a shared folder. In this case:
- create and share a folder somewhere on your LAN - let's say \\HTPC\Actors
- give R/W access to all users
- enter it in MCRatings as the download folder for Thumbnails
- on JRiver, the Expression to reference a given Actor profile becomes:

Code: [Select]

<img src="\\HTPC\Actors\Keanu Reeves" width="100">
Of course, this expression needs to be more complicated as you don't want Keanu Reeves to be in all your movies, no matter how popular he is.

I hope this helps. I'm sure we'll go back and forth a few times, refining the solution until it works as desired!

Zybex

[Moe]

The poster stuff looks great! Can't wait to give it a whirl.  Excellent work!

What are you using for post-processing on images?  if it's imagemagik, this is going to be a real game changer for people not comfortable working on the command line.

[arcspin]

And please Moe and others.
If you could look into making the most out of the crew and cast  thumbnails as well.

Thank you and take care!

[MagerClab]

Thanks a lot!

[zybex]

The poster stuff looks great! Can't wait to give it a whirl.  Excellent work!

Thanks Moe! I should have used a screenshot of John Wick instead, then it would be breathtaking instead of just great! 

What are you using for post-processing on images?  if it's imagemagik, this is going to be a real game changer for people not comfortable working on the command line.

It doesn't work like that. I'm just providing a command line box where you can enter whatever command you like, and it gets called after each image is downloaded. It's up to the user to enter a command, or create a .bat that calls ImageMagik or other tools with whatever parameters needed to do whatever you like.

I'm hoping that people here start sharing some useful scripts/commands to put there *hint hint*
I expect the most common setup would be:
- have ImageMagik installed
- create a batch script to call ImageMagik to transform a picture the way you want
- add the command "c:\scripts\myScript.bat $image $name $role" (or whatever args the script needs) to MCRatings.

And that's it! Customizeable post-processing FTW.

Zybex

[Moe]

Unfortunately, I am not a programmer (yet).  So, while I can somewhat follow along with what you're saying, it's going to be above my current skill set.  I could share my imagemagik templates that achieve what I have done but I wouldn't be able to merge the image and actor/role information together.

[zybex]

Programming should not be needed for this - it's just calling ImageMagick's "convert" with a bunch of parameters (template) to achieve what we want. I haven't used IM much, but it should be straightforward (once you navigate the hundreds of IM options available...)

Please share a couple of your templates, maybe I can try it out and come up with an example on how to use it with MCRatings (next weekend).

[lepa]

Thanks zybex for new version.
Moe, MCUtils is basically doing the same. We'll give our parameters how to start ImageMagick (source image >> postprocessing >> destination image) So you can experiment by starting ImageMagick in command line by giving it source image, commands what to do with that image and where to save the changes  e.g "magick convert rose.jpg -resize 50% rose.png" then when you're satisfied with the end result you can add that command (program start + parameters) to MCRatings

https://imagemagick.org/script/command-line-processing.php
I have for example made following perl script which tells MCUtils to run image through ImageMagick using these command line parameters.

Code: [Select]

definePostprocCommand(caption_rsplit => {
    format  => 'magick "%s" -set option:WIDTH "%%w"
                    "(" -size "%%[WIDTH]x120" -background "#0008" -fill white -gravity south -kerning 4 -pointsize 50 -interline-spacing -20 -font Segoe-UI-Bold caption:"%s" -gravity south ")"
                    -composite -bordercolor "#414056" -border 5 +repage "(" +clone -background white -shadow 40x2+5+5 ")" +swap -background none -layers merge +repage "%s"',
    args    => [ '<file>', 'rsplit(<person>)', '<actor1>' ]
});

[Moe]

Yes, I know that it's essentially doing what MCUtils is doing.  The part that I figured would take "programming" would be generating the token for the actors name and role to append to the image.  From what I understood of MCRatings it could do post processing on the image itself, but I don't know if it can use other fields that MCRatings receives and merge them with the image.

This is the code from MCUtils that generates the images that you see in my screenshots

Code: [Select]

definePostprocCommand(caption_ac => {
    format  => 'magick "%s" -gravity center -extent 2:3 -resize 130x195
                    "(" -size 130x -background none -fill white -pointsize 16 -gravity northwest -font Segoe-UI-SemiBold caption:"%s" ")"
                    "(" -size 130x -background none -fill white -pointsize 14 -gravity northwest -font Segoe-UI-Italic caption:"%s" ")"
                    -append "%s"',
    args    => [ '<file>', '\<person>', '\<role>', '<actor2>' ]
});


This is the code to generate a circular image, like what Plex uses

Code: [Select]

definePostprocCommand(caption_circle => {
    format  => 'magick "%s" -gravity center
                    "(" -size 342x342 xc:Black -fill White -draw "circle 171 171 171 1" -alpha Copy ")"
                    -compose CopyOpacity -composite -trim
                    "(" -size 342x75 -background none -fill white -gravity west -font "Times-New-Roman" caption:"%s" ")"
                    "(" -size 342x75 -background none -fill white -gravity west -font "Times-New-Roman" caption:"%s" ")"
                    -append "%s"',
    args    => [ '<file>', '\<person>', '\<role>', '<actor2>' ]
});



[lepa]

From the MCRating configuration picture I posted I get that there are input parameters like $name and $role which are passed to e.g. imageMagick script

[zybex]

OK, I made it work with ImageMagick, and the ingredients are below. The devil is in the details
I've used Moe's ImageMagick script (modified to run on a .bat script) to add Name/Role to MCRs downloaded thumbnails:

 ->           -> 

Instructions:
1. install ImageMagick - select option to Add To Path
2. Create a folder C:\Scripts and extract the attached .7z file there (c:\scripts\caption.bat should be there)
3. upgrade to MCRatings v3.0.4 or above - I've made some tweaks today and added a couple of new script $tags (you can use the embedded Upgrade button)
4. In Settings->Posters:
    - Turn on Save Actor/Crew thumbnails, enter a folder accessible by JRiver (or leave the default)
    - Turn on Save As PNG, and select Thumbnail size = Medium (or better)
    - On the Run Post-processing command for thumbnails, enter this:

Code: [Select]

c:\scripts\caption.bat $image $name $role "$namerole.png" $type5. Run MCRatings, and do Get Movie Info on some movies

That's it! You will see a spinner on MCRs bottom-right corner while the scripts are running. Then you can look at the folder you selected in 4. and the new thumbnails with name+role should be there.

To use them in JRiver, there are several steps too:
- turn on the MCR option Add role to actor names in Settings->Misc
- update your movies with Get Movie Info + Save to JRiver with this option on (to get the updated "Actor Name [Role]" names)
- On theaterView/Tooltip expressions, the expression must now use these Actor names to get the corresponding PNGs. I think Moe/Lepa can take it from here

I hope this guide helps! I'll do another post dissecting the caption.bat script and the MCRs post-processing command line, since there are some details there that should be documented.

Br,
Zybex

[zybex]

<insert expletive>
I've just spent half an hour typing a detailed explanation, only to lose it to a browser refresh. Grrrr...
I'll post it later tomorrow.

EDIT: I'll add it to the Wiki soon.

[Moe]

Awesome stuff Zybex!

Here is how I display one actor in Theater View. 

I have all my actor images stored at R:\Actors in a folder corresponding to their first name.  It looks like this

R:\Actors\A\
R:\Actors\B\
R:\Actors\C\
...
R:\Actors\Y\
R:\Actors\Z\

I have over 75,000 images so that is why I have separated them into individual letter folders.

I created a new field called [Actor 1] (I also created Actor 2 - 10)

Code: [Select]

<img src="R:\Actors\Left(listitem([TMDB Actors Name],0), 1)\listitem([TMDB Actors Name],0) - [tmdb id].png"  width="130">
To break this down,

Code: [Select]

Left(listitem([TMDB Actors Name],0), 1)\
Takes the first letter of the actors name and appends it to R:\Actors\  So, if the Actor in question is Tom Hanks I end up with R:\Actors\T\

Next, this part of the code

Code: [Select]

listitem([TMDB Actors Name],0)
returns the first Actors name from the [TMDB Actors Name field].  This may be a different field for you, it might just be [Actors].  if you want to return the second actors name you'd change the above to

Code: [Select]

listitem([TMDB Actors Name],1)and for the third actor you'd use

Code: [Select]

listitem([TMDB Actors Name],2)and so on and so forth

Finally this bit of code

Code: [Select]

- [tmdb id].png
adds a dash and then the movies tmdb-id appended with .png

So, I end up with something like this - R:\Actors\T\Tom Hanks - m11974.png

You've done the community a really great service with this Zybex.  While I love MCUtils, I know that it's lack of a GUI is a big roadblock to a lot of people.  I have a feeling this is going to get used a lot.

[JimH]

<insert expletive>
I've just spent half an hour typing a detailed explanation, only to lose it to a browser refresh. Grrrr...
I'll post it later tomorrow.

Sometimes you can recover by backing up in the browser.

[JimH]

Very nice work.  Thanks.

[Moe]

Zybex, if you're looking to further expand MCRatings, it would be nice to see it be able to get clearart, banners, etc. from https://fanart.tv/  I get that artwork now from Mediaelch but it would be cool to consolidate programs.  Once again, stellar work on this.

[thorsten]

+1

And also a big THANK YOU for MCR! Love the program 

[Moe]

I got to put the poster finder to work today.  Works wonderfully, much better than the one built into MC, I love being able to choose which one I want. 

[Moe]

Zybex, I have a small feature request.  Would it be possible to add a "ignore articles" option, so that movies like The Big Lebowski show up under B and not T?

[arcspin]

Solved: I created another folder to save the pictures and now the pictures are appearing with actors name/roll.

[arcspin]

I have all my actor images stored at R:\Actors in a folder corresponding to their first name.  It looks like this

R:\Actors\A\
R:\Actors\B\
R:\Actors\C\
...
R:\Actors\Y\
R:\Actors\Z\

Question:
How do you get all actor images sorted in the correct folder?
When saved from MCR they are only saved in one folder

Is this a feature only found in MCUtils?


//arscpin


ps.
(I did a search and this is how many files you can save in one folder)
4,294,967,295 files into a single folder if drive is formatted with NTFS

So, if there isn't any way of sorting pictures using only MCR I can live with all pictures are saved in one folder. ;o)

[arcspin]

This post is inescapable and I'm in need of assistance

I have manage to create thumbnails with name & roll for actors/producers/composer/and so on.
All my thumbnails are saved in this location: F:\JRiver\Actors

Now what do I have to do in JRiver to get them to appear in the file info panel?

Great many thank you and stay healthy!

//arcspin

[Moe]

Question:
How do you get all actor images sorted in the correct folder?
When saved from MCR they are only saved in one folder

Is this a feature only found in MCUtils?

Saving to individual letters is a custom function for MCUtils that MrC generated for me.  If you asked really nicely, maybe Zybex could implement something in MCR or he could make you a batch script that would do it.

(I did a search and this is how many files you can save in one folder)
4,294,967,295 files into a single folder if drive is formatted with NTFS

While it's true that a folder can hold that many files, you may start running into performance issues long before that, I know that I did.

Now what do I have to do in JRiver to get them to appear in the file info panel?

One potential problem I can see is how MCR is saving the images.  The built in template is saving them in this format

Adam Driver [Kylo Ren].png

While, with how I have MCUtils setup, that same image would save as

Adam Driver - m181812.png

The number after the actors name being the TMDB ID, which is a unique identifier for each movie.

As far as I am aware, MCR does not save the actors role anywhere, in text form, to MC.  Since the image is saved with the role in the filename, eg. Adam Driver [Kylo Ren], I see no easy way to incorporate the image into MC.  If MCR could be tweaked a bit to create a new list field formatted like "Actor Name [Role]; Actor Name [Role]; Actor Name [Role]" etc.  Then it could pretty easily be done. For the sake of this conversation, lets say MCR created a new field called [MCR Actor Role] Then you could easily add images the images to MC by doing something like:

<img src="R:\Actors\listitem([MCR Actor Role],0).png"  width="130">
<img src="R:\Actors\listitem([MCR Actor Role],1).png"  width="130">
<img src="R:\Actors\listitem([MCR Actor Role],2).png"  width="130">

Which would return the first three actors. (I would put each of the above three lines into their own field, called Actor 1, Actor 2, Actor 3)

Another option would be to have MCR capture the movies TMDB ID to a field (or add an IMDB ID token), you could then use the same method that I use to display images.   

I'm a moron

[Moe]

I decided to see if I could make a batch script myself to move the images to individual letter folders and I figured it out.

put this in a text file and save as something like _move_to_letters.bat (make sure to put the _ at the start of the file name, otherwise it will move itself)  Save to the same folder that the images are saved to.

Code: [Select]

@ECHO ON

SET Letters=(A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z)
SET Numbers=(0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9)
SET SourceDir=C:\YourPathHere
SET DestLetterDir=C:\YourPathHere\
SET DestNumDir=C:\YourPathHere\#

FOR %%A IN %Letters% DO MOVE "%SourceDir%\%%~A*.*" "%DestLetterDir%\%%~A\"
FOR %%B IN %Numbers% DO MOVE "%SourceDir%\%%~B*.*" "%DestNumDir%\"
GOTO EOF

You will have to change the YourPathHere to the path where your images are being saved.  In the folder where the images are being saved, you will need to manually create folders for each letter, A, B, C, etc.  Once all the individual letter folders are created, simply double click your .bat file and the images will move to their respective folders.

[arcspin]

I decided to see if I could make a batch script myself to move the images to individual letter folders and I figured it out.

It works!

I also added the Swedish letter å,ä,ö after the letter z but that didn't take when I tried to batch-move an actor with an Swedish sounding name and do the the bat-file. All other names got sorted out just fine but my fake actor with the letter Å didn't get moved.

When I look in the MCR settings I see ImdB ID taken from the source OMDb, it can be changed to TMDb.


@zybex
I'm sure you are reading this as well and are on the case when you have the time regarding unique id-filenames and (batch)move files to a corresponding folder.


Suggestion, if we can add info to actors pictures, is there anything that prevents MCR to add info text to posters as well?
I'm thinking a UHD, HD, 720, 480 Logo of sorts and perhaps other information that might be useful.
Perhaps making another folder named Posters and under that folder add a-z & 0-1 folders and add posters there?




This is great progress that are being made here and I thank you all for the effort!!!

//arcspin

[thorsten]

I got it!

Thanks to Zybex's script with Magicks and Moe's like-usual perfect description of his expression and sorting, I got the pictures up and running! Wonderful! I gave MCutils a try, but it was too complex for me so I opted to wait for a smarter solution and voilà: we got it 

But I think I found a bug:
if I run the script with my whole collection of 700 films at once, it only gets the first movie(role) of each actor. E.g. "Sylvester Stallone [Rocky Balboa Jr.]" but not "Sylvester Stallone [Barney]" from Expendibles. Seems as if MCRatings is just searching the name of the actor only for the first result.

I now run my library for every first letter of the alphabet in MCratings, therefore I should get mot of the pictures.

BR,

Thorsten

[thorsten]

Based on numbers:
whole collection: 3,500 actor pictures
letter by letter: 4,900 actor pictures

[thorsten]

And to finish for today: this is my "Actors" code, with standard values from MCRatings and sorted in directories per letter:

Code: [Select]

<img src="E:\JRiver\Actors\Left(listitem([Actors],0), 1)\listitem([Actors],0).png" width="130"> <img src="E:\JRiver\Actors\Left(listitem([Actors],1), 1)\listitem([Actors],1).png" width="130"> <img src="E:\JRiver\Actors\Left(listitem([Actors],2), 1)\listitem([Actors],2).png" width="130"> <img src="E:\JRiver\Actors\Left(listitem([Actors],3), 1)\listitem([Actors],3).png" width="130"> <img src="E:\JRiver\Actors\Left(listitem([Actors],4), 1)\listitem([Actors],4).png" width="130"> <img src="E:\JRiver\Actors\Left(listitem([Actors],5), 1)\listitem([Actors],5).png" width="130"> <img src="E:\JRiver\Actors\Left(listitem([Actors],6), 1)\listitem([Actors],6).png" width="130">
Always use "space" between each Actor, so that they are shown side by side.

[thorsten]

Aaaand…. another "bug"/feature  ?

Movie: baby driver
Actor/role: Ansel Elgort [Miles "Baby"]
Picture: Ansel Elgort [Miles Baby]

@Zybex: perhaps such "system" typos (don't know the english word for it) should be automatically ignored right in the name of the actor/role ?

I just corrected it directly in mc-tagging.

[zybex]

As far as I am aware, MCR does not save the actors role anywhere, in text form, to MC. 

There's an option in Settings->Misc to "Add Role to Actor Name". This option causes the Actors names to be saved to JRiver as "Actor Name [Role]".

The actor profiles are saved with the same template, this is designed so that each name+role saved to JRiver matches the filename exactly.

[zybex]

@zybex
I'm sure you are reading this as well and are on the case when you have the time regarding unique id-filenames and (batch)move files to a corresponding folder.

I'll add that option on next version. One think I'm concerned with is "option bloating". I don't want to add too many options... one way is to add them only on the config file, not on the UI. So you would have to edit the MCR config file to change that setting.

Suggestion, if we can add info to actors pictures, is there anything that prevents MCR to add info text to posters as well?
I'm thinking a UHD, HD, 720, 480 Logo of sorts and perhaps other information that might be useful.
Perhaps making another folder named Posters and under that folder add a-z & 0-1 folders and add posters there?

You can use the Poster post-processing [PP] command to do that with ImageMagick, I suppose, though none of the current PP $tags include that kind of information.

At his point, I wonder if it wouldn't be easy to just generate the entire Tooltip/TheaterView info for each movie as a full PNG image, with all info in it and designed in some external application, and then in JRiver the tooltip would just be <img src="imdbID.png"> 

[zybex]

But I think I found a bug:
if I run the script with my whole collection of 700 films at once, it only gets the first movie(role) of each actor. E.g. "Sylvester Stallone [Rocky Balboa Jr.]" but not "Sylvester Stallone [Barney]" from Expendibles. Seems as if MCRatings is just searching the name of the actor only for the first result.

That's a bug indeed, thank you for reporting. It shall be fixed.

Movie: baby driver
Actor/role: Ansel Elgort [Miles "Baby"]
Picture: Ansel Elgort [Miles Baby]

Double quotes are a pain to deal with in code. Yes, they should be preserved there, I'll fix it.

[zybex]

Thorsten, are you using the caption to put the actor AND role on the image?  If so, you're going to run into problems.  If an actor is in more than one movie, since the image is only being saved by the actors name, you can only have one image per actor. 

MCR saves multiple pictures for the same actor:
"Keanu Reeves [Neo].png"
"Keanu Reeves [John Wick].png"

The option "Add Role to Actor Name" saves the actors using this same format, so you can split [Actors] in JRiver directly into a list of PNGs.

Note that is is better than using the tmdbID or imdbID, as the same actor may have multiple roles on the same movie. If you want the role to be embedded into the picture, then having a single "Actor - tmdbID.png" file won't work.

[zybex]

Based on numbers:
whole collection: 3,500 actor pictures
letter by letter: 4,900 actor pictures

There are 2 bugs in MCR causing this:
- During a GET of multiple movies, MCR has multiple threads working in parallel. If one of them is downloading Jessica Alba's profile for movie 1, a second thread for movie 2 which also stars Jessica Alba will skip it, because it's already in the download queue - so you end up with only 1 PNG of Jessica instead of 3 (one per role, plus one extra just to drool over because it's Jessica Alba). You can work around this by just doing GET multiple times until all actors+roles are covered.
- As you've found out, if a movie has the same actor in multiple roles, only the first is fetched.

I'm quite busy lately with work, when I have some free time I'll fix these.
Seems that working from home doesn't make it less work somehow 

[Moe]

Aww, sorry, I missed that setting.  Apologies for clouding the water.

Note that is is better than using the tmdbID or imdbID, as the same actor may have multiple roles on the same movie. If you want the role to be embedded into the picture, then having a single "Actor - tmdbID.png" file won't work.

I am not sure why you say this though.  As that doesn't have to be the case at all.  As an example (it may be hard to see, the image is transparent, but there are multiple lines of text below it)



Why would you generate an image of the actor for each role rather than list each role under the actors name in the same image?

Actually, from doing some testing before posting this (in an effort to keep my foot out of my mouth) I think I uncovered a bug.  Movies like Glass (where my image above comes from) or something like X-Men First Class where actors are credited with more than one role and there is a slash / it seems to break the image generation with MCR. I tested with a few movies and everyone where the role contains a slash, no image was created.

Sorry again for missing that setting and posting irrelevant things.

[zybex]

Why would you generate an image of the actor for each role rather than list each role under the actors name in the same image?

You have a point, I hadn't considered that way of doing it. For some reason I assumed the TMDB data has the same actor multiple times, but you're right - the actor is listed once, with multiple roles listed with a slash separator.

It's likely that the slash breaks MCR image output, that's one more bug to fix. Thanks for reporting!

[thorsten]

Moe, I use actor[role] as zybex wrote. It works really good!

One movie is back tomfuture part 2 or 3: Michael J. Fox has up to 3 roles and names. MCR gets it correct from the data bases, but writes only one role name in the .png name (or even none, I‘m not sure).

But, this is peanuts regarding the steps I needed to do before! MC search in tmdb, MCR, Mediaelch, MCutil for combining the picture/name... now, it is a breeze 

[Mans]

Great day Zybex,

Many thanks for all the hard work.
I've updated MCR to the latest version and trying to get the name and role added.

That's it! You will see a spinner on MCRs bottom-right corner while the scripts are running. Then you can look at the folder you selected in 4. and the new thumbnails with name+role should be there.

I'm noticing the folder gets continues filled but also gets immediately flushed within the process.
I've got some 800 movies and at the end there are only some 10 images left within the folder.

With the initial version of MCR and so without the additional script, there were some 5000 images within the folder.

Any idea sir ?
Thanks for your help !

[zybex]

Hi Mans,
I wrote a line-by-line explanation for that script I provided, but then lost it It would explain what you're seeing.

MCR downloads an actor picture and names it "Joe Actor.png". Then it calls the post-processing script on it.
The PP script I provided does this:

• if the file "Joe Actor [Lame Role].png" already exists, jumps to 3
• call imageMagick to process the "Joe Actor.png". This generates "Joe Actor [Lame Role].png"
• delete the original "Joe Actor.png" because you don't need it anymore

So, what you're seeing is step 2 failing, and step 3 doing what it was written to do.
I suggest you remove step 3 from the script (last line) and run the script manually on some PNG to find out why it's failing.
My guess it that "magick" is not on your PATH, so it's failing to run. Just type "magick" on cmd prompt to confirm if it works.

[Mans]

Thanks Zybex,

I've checked via CMD and this is the feedback, any hint or suggestion sir ?
Another thanks,


Usage: magick tool [ {option} | {image} ... ] {output_image}
Usage: magick [ {option} | {image} ... ] {output_image}
       magick [ {option} | {image} ... ] -script {filename} [ {script_args} ...]
       magick -help | -version | -usage | -list {option}

[zybex]

The attached script adds logging to c:\scripts\caption.log.
Replace the script with this new one, run MCR and do GET on 1 or 2 movies, then check the log file. It should show some ImageMagick errors.

Please post a sample error so we can check if it's something that needs improvement in MCR.

[Mans]

Hi Zybex, ok, here we go:

************* Invoking magick ************* 
magick "\\NAS1\Film_Collection\Actor Images\Benicio del Toro.png" -gravity center -extent 2:3 -resize 130x195   "(" -size 130x -background none -fill white -pointsize 16 -gravity northwest -font Segoe-UI-SemiBold caption:"Benicio del Toro" ")"   "(" -size 130x -background none -fill lightgreen -pointsize 14 -gravity northwest -font Segoe-UI-Italic caption:"Jack Jordan" ")"   -append "Benicio del Toro [Jack Jordan].png"
Deleting "\\NAS1\Film_Collection\Actor Images\Sean Penn.png"
Deleting "\\NAS1\Film_Collection\Actor Images\Benicio del Toro.png"
************* Invoking magick ************* 
magick "\\NAS1\Film_Collection\Actor Images\Naomi Watts.png" -gravity center -extent 2:3 -resize 130x195   "(" -size 130x -background none -fill white -pointsize 16 -gravity northwest -font Segoe-UI-SemiBold caption:"Naomi Watts" ")"   "(" -size 130x -background none -fill lightgreen -pointsize 14 -gravity northwest -font Segoe-UI-Italic caption:"Cristina Peck" ")"   -append "Naomi Watts [Cristina Peck].png"
magick: unable to open image 'Naomi Watts [Cristina Peck].png': Permission denied @ error/blob.c/OpenBlob/3496.
magick: WriteBlob Failed `Naomi Watts [Cristina Peck].png' @ error/png.c/MagickPNGErrorHandler/1715.
Deleting "\\NAS1\Film_Collection\Actor Images\Naomi Watts.png"
************* Invoking magick ************* 
magick "\\NAS1\Film_Collection\Actor Images\Amy Brenneman.png" -gravity center -extent 2:3 -resize 130x195   "(" -size 130x -background none -fill white -pointsize 16 -gravity northwest -font Segoe-UI-SemiBold caption:"Amy Brenneman" ")"   "(" -size 130x -background none -fill lightgreen -pointsize 14 -gravity northwest -font Segoe-UI-Italic caption:"Shelly Barnes" ")"   -append "Amy Brenneman [Shelly Barnes].png"
magick: unable to open image 'Amy Brenneman [Shelly Barnes].png': Permission denied @ error/blob.c/OpenBlob/3496.
magick: WriteBlob Failed `Amy Brenneman [Shelly Barnes].png' @ error/png.c/MagickPNGErrorHandler/1715.
Deleting "\\NAS1\Film_Collection\Actor Images\Amy Brenneman.png"

[zybex]

magick: unable to open image 'Naomi Watts [Cristina Peck].png': Permission denied @ error/blob.c/OpenBlob/3496.
magick: unable to open image 'Amy Brenneman [Shelly Barnes].png': Permission denied @ error/blob.c/OpenBlob/3496.

magick is failing to write to your NAS1 share. Several possibilities:
- your NAS share permissions are wrong; add RW permissions for "everyone/world" if you can (not the best advice ever, but...)
- there are already files with the same name on the folder, and they're marked read-only or have the wrong permissions
- your NAS limits the number of simultaneous accesses; MCR is downloading 4 images at the same time, then the script is also processing another 4 at a given time. This is not much, any NAS should cope with it... but it's a possibility.
- disk full?

You can also try to change the thumbnail folder to C:\something to see if it works.

[Mans]

Hi Zybex,

Your guess was correct :-)

The images are there when adding a local path/folder.
Not sure why the NAS access is causing this problem, as the user and machine are granted with correct rights and never caused issues or limitations before.

Testing as we speak and another thanks sir for the nice work !

[zybex]

Mans,

I know what the problem is and reproduced it on my own NAS: the script is not providing the full path for the output file, just the filename - so ImageMagick is trying to write it to its install folder which is in C:\ProgramFiles, hence the permission denied.

MCR tries to set the "working folder" before calling the PP script. This works fine for C: folders, but it's not possible to set the WorkingDir of a process to a network location.

Additionally, it looks like the logging I added to the BAT script makes things worse since it sometimes fails with parallel downloads and crashes Magick.

You can work around this by using the attached script and this PP command in MCR:

c:\scripts\caption.bat $image $name $role "%imagedir\%namerole.png" $type

This is working fine on my NAS, but I'll also fix the WorkingDir issue in MCR

[Mans]

Bam !
You've found two issues and solved them in one go :-)

Many thanks Zybex, I'm away for a couple of hours, but once back I'll swap the script and the MCR command.

Take care !

[Mans]

Hi Zybex,

Works like a charm sir :-):-):-)

Thanks and take care !

[Mans]

Greatday Zybex,

One more :-)
Additionally, how should i continue on the [Director], [Producer], etc, fields.

I've found MCR will grab and add the images for p.e. the Directors and puts [Director] behind the names.
But noticed these images aren't maching with the [Director] field.

Would it make sense to have MCR also adding [Director], etc, into the data fields ? So we can match the field with the generated images ?

Thanks again for your help sir !