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Author Topic: Automatic handling of folder.jpg for video?  (Read 3199 times)

Marty3d

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Automatic handling of folder.jpg for video?
« on: September 14, 2006, 05:52:36 am »

Is this simple feature something we'll going to see in MC12?

Thanks!
/Martin
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Alex B

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Re: Automatic handling of folder.jpg for video?
« Reply #1 on: September 14, 2006, 01:39:47 pm »

In my opinion folder.jpg does not work well with video covers. Mostly each video has a different cover image. I keep my video files in folders that contain certain type of videos or for example complete series. Since video tagging is not standardized the best approach would be to use the same filename with the video file. Naturally the filename extension would be different.

Here is another recent thread about this topic: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=35648.0. Could a moderator combine these two threads?
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Jaguu

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Re: Automatic handling of folder.jpg for video?
« Reply #2 on: September 14, 2006, 03:01:05 pm »

Yes, Alex advice was very good and I followed it myself. Before I had all video (.avi) files in one folder and adding cover art was cumbersome. Now, I have for every movie a separate folder, named according to the movie title and inside the movie folder one or more video and image files. I use the option "Add cover art from file".
This has the advantage than I can have several movie files (or episodes) belonging to the same movie or series in one folder.

Of course some more automation would be handy, I added an extra field for actors and I am contemplating moving the director to a separate field director (now it's the artist). In the genre field I make distinctions such as movie, tv-movie, tv-serie, tv-recording and use a field subgenre to do the proper genre distinction such as comedy, drama, fantasy, science-fiction, romance. This allows multiple choices which is not possible with the genre field. I prefer the more squared images if available from the respective audio recordings as they look much nicer than the dvd covers.

In general I would like to have more proper distinction of the different media types in MC  (fields, views etc), real separate database schemes for different media types, but in general one always finds some working solution.

Retrieving cover art is quite easy. Enter the movie title in Google-Pictures and select the one that you like best. In most case you will find a proper image. They don't have to be huge as you need them only as templates for thumbnails.
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Marty3d

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Re: Automatic handling of folder.jpg for video?
« Reply #3 on: September 15, 2006, 08:57:17 am »

I also have my videos organized like that. All movies have their separate folder, containing the video file and a folder.jpg. For series, I put all episodes of a tvshows each season in like this:
Lost
- S01
 - (files) Episode 1, 2, 3 etc

So if I didn't had to assign each cover art manually, it would be a great time saver. Music albums (you put the albums tracks in one folder) work like that, why shouldnt video if organized correctly do the same?
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Jaguu

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Re: Automatic handling of folder.jpg for video?
« Reply #4 on: September 15, 2006, 11:44:25 am »

The difference to audio is that video by default gets the movie title in the name field, the album fields gets the date and the artist field remains empty.

It would be enough to be able to define the file rules of cover art mode "Next to file". I would then define the filename for "Next to file" as D:\Media\Video\[Name].

It is just too much hassle renaming the album and giving the artist a name, usually the  movie director to fit the predefined [Artist] - [Album] scheme. Usually I care only for the actors and the genre.
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Marty3d

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Re: Automatic handling of folder.jpg for video?
« Reply #5 on: September 19, 2006, 06:59:50 am »

I too find it annoying having to change the album field from date. I put the movie name in the album field, so if a movie is in several parts, I can use album to group them up nicely.

Maybe I'm thick, but I still doesn't grasp why the cover art rule "Next to file (folder.jpg)" couldn't be applied to video...:)

Since the rule actually exists in the options dialogue, a different user might think that it's broken... So, two solutions:
1. Put in "audio only" for the option
2. Make it work for other filetypes than audio

What do you think?
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Alex B

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Re: Automatic handling of folder.jpg for video?
« Reply #6 on: September 19, 2006, 08:33:51 am »

Maybe I'm thick, but I still doesn't grasp why the cover art rule "Next to file (folder.jpg)" couldn't be applied to video...:)

Of course it should work if you have one video file and one cover art file in each folder. I have only a few video folders (categorized by movie genre, TV series, home videos etc...) and many video files in each.

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.
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