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[gappie]

i really like the new feature wher it is easy to put the screencrabs from a video file in athe specified folder. apparently the files get stored as DVDVideo - [name] or video - [name] . i have two problems here. one is with dvdvideo files. when those files are pickedup by mc, it names those files videots, with the right name in the album. the broblem is that when you dont change the name by hand (or you click autoimport which always seems to think the name should be changed back) all those screengrabs overwrite eachother, or one with out a screengrab just picks the one called dvdvideo - videots. i think in this case it makes sence when there are some more parameters involved in the naming, like album.
besides that, i found it logical for series to name the album as the name of the serie, and the name as the sequences, so 1 and 2 etc. the result is that the different series overwrite eachothers screenshots, because they are named as video - 1, video - 2 etc.

 
gab

[gappie]

let me change this to a warning. when you use the 'locate cover art to external location etc' tool in coverart for video, make very sure that you change the names for all the dvd files you have ripped or imported with mc, and that all the names are unique. i lost about 40 coverarts/screengrabs because of this...

 
gab

[Alex B]

Mysterious and unexpected things don't happen if you fully understand how the automated tools work. And no, they are not yet documented, at least not fully. You must be your detective and do the needed tests.

However, that is not the only alternative. You can control the process manually:

1. Use the "Save screengrab to file" tool. Give the saved file a meaningful and unique name. (... or give an externally obtained cover art file a meaningful and unique name.) Place the file either in the video file's folder or in a common "cover art" location.

2. Create the cover art link manually. Use either the "Add from file" tool or simply drag the image file from Windows Explorer to the expanded Image window in Action Window > Tag. Naturally you can link a single image file with a bunch of selected files when preferred. I do that with TV series.

In addition to backing up the library it would be a good idea to export the cover art links and other video tags separately. You can select all video files and export an MPL playlist that contains all field data including the cover art links.

I usually do that for each separate base folder individually. For instance, I just exported an MPL file that contains all recorded Battlestar Galactica episodes to my Battlestar Galactica base folder. I used the "relative paths" option so that the drive letter and the first root folder are not included in the file paths. This makes possible to import the MPL file to a new MC library even if the root is different.

[gappie]

Mysterious and unexpected things don't happen if you fully understand how the automated tools work. And no, they are not documented, at least not fully. You must be your detective and do the needed tests.

However, that is not the only alternative. You can control the process manually:

1. Use the "Save screengrab to file" tool. Give the saved file a meaningful and unique name. (... or give an externally obtained cover art file a meaningful and unique name.) Place the file either in the video file's folder or in a common "cover art" location.

2. Create the cover art link manually. Use either the "Add from file" tool or simply drag the image file from Windows Explorer to the expanded Image window in Action Window > Tag. Naturally you can link a single image file with a bunch of selected files when preferred. I do that with TV series.

In addition to backing up the library it would be a good idea to export the cover art links. You can select all video files and export an MPL playlist that contains all field data including the cover art links.

I usually do that for each separate base folder individually. For instance, I just exported an MPL file that contains all recorded Battlestar Galactica episodes to my Battlestar Galactica base folder. I used the "relative paths" option so that the drive letter and the first root folder are not included in the file paths. This makes possible to import the MPL file to a new MC library even if the root is different.

thanks alex.. and i know unexpected things can happen. as a attachment i hanged a screenshot from how mc13 saves cover art out of the box. when people make screenshots for there movies using the use screencap for thumb tool, files dont overwrite as far as i know. now when you want them to save them with the other coverart in the cover art folder mc does overwrite. music is saved there using artist - album, videoos only using the name. which for a unknown user is already named wrong when using dvdfiles. so that is why i think this could be done a bit smarter.. or at least to warn people that they should not handle this tool to ease..and since i thought it was the idea to make mc more user frienly i thought i started with a request.. 

edit: let me give an other example. somebody has all 10 sequences of 24 hours ripped as seperate files for each 'hour'. so maybe he named the albums like '24 hour first season' etc. with in there the files named as 1, 2 etc. he has downl;oaded the cover or made a screencap. and then uses just like he does with albums the cover art 'locate coverart etc'. the result will be a mess.

[Alex B]

Since MC11 was new I have suggested that video cover art options should be separated from audio cover art options. For instance, folder.jpg in the album folder might be preferred for audio files, but it cannot be used with a TV series if it is stored in single folder and the user wants to link a separate cover art file with each episode. The video cover art naming issues have been discussed several times. I am too lazy to search for the old threads, but here are some of the old suggestions:

- Separate the audio and video cover art options.

- When the "Use screen grab for a thumbnail" command is issued make it use the selected video cover art naming option instead of storing the resulting image file to a hidden and cryptic folder path.

- Change the "Screen grab to file" tool to offer to automatically use the selected naming option instead of whatever it uses now (apperently C:\ and no default name...)

- It was suggested that the video cover art name rule could use the video file's filename or maybe a combination of the filename and some tags by default, but in my opinion it should be a user configurable string because, unlike audio tagging, video tagging doesn't have an established standard.

As you said the default name rule is now "Video - [Name].jpg". The "Video - " part is quite unnecessary and the value of the [Name] field is not necessarily unique.

The default string should be a bit more complex, like "[Date (filename friendly)] - [Filename (name)].jpg". Then it would be able to handle a situation in which the Name field contains identical values from file to another (like "Conan O'Brian" or so) and only the epsisode or track numbers differ. The included video file's filename extension would indicate a video cover art file. In any case there should be a dialog box in which a user defined rule could be typed.

Since MC can now link cover art with data files maybe there should also be a third section for them.