Local Actor Thumbs?

Perhaps support for local actor thumbs...

the pictures online that it usually pulls are often crappy (no offense to you all offnse to the sources). So i usually download actor thumbs locally. however even if i manually edit the nfo files it doesn't seem to want to display local actor thumbs.

No Biggie, just those crappy actor pics kinda lowers the overall look of my HTPC (so i'm shallow in that respect i admit it... but what good is it having a slick interface when one aspect of that interface brings the rest of it down.)

Edit:
Ok. It just became a big problem, as it apparently deletes the reference to my local actor thumbs from the NFO, now i have to go back and redo all of them which is a pain in the ass.

omg i was just in a convo with StormyKnight about this.....

I was asking him if XBMC does infact actually use the Plot etc from the local .nfo that Media Companion (MC) creates, because when i scan in new content into XBMC it takes forrrreveerrrrr. It seems as if its scraping it all fresh again.

Billy can you shed some light on what XBMC actually pulls from MC's .nfo files it creates?

StormyKnight was saying that the possible reasoning for the slow adding of new content is because XBMC dosnt support local actor thumbs, thus it goes online to pull them all!!

yeah, it does to seem to pull the nfo from the files on load(although not any locally stored actor thumbs - it seems the program only supports those as url items even though xbmc can use the locally stored thumbs), but then any discrepancies (extra tags or information or anything that doesn't conform to the program stats) is deleted. It'd be nice if it did a append/edit, instead of completely rewriting the whole file.

I also noticed that the fanart select overwrites the locally stored fanart and there's no option to select locally stored fanart either. which is problematic for me, since i have usually anywhere from 2-16 locally stored fanarts for each movie in the movie folder that i've manually downloaded.

I guess i'd like more non-internet functionality all around, i use the internet secondarily to manage my info, i actually import my Information from Ant Movie Catalog with a script i've written for it. Although i like this program for being able to make edits and visually see what i may or may not be missing, or i might want to change in an nfo file.

Correction:
For some reason XBMC will NOT read thumbnail files for actors located in the directory with the file (which i consider an oversight), if you attempt to read the actor thumbs from the same directory it takes forever for the XBMC to update from an nfo.

see this topic for more info:
http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=35235

Nicezia wrote:

yeah, it does to seem to pull the nfo from the files on load(although not any locally stored actor thumbs - it seems the program only supports those as url items even though xbmc can use the locally stored thumbs), but then any discrepancies (extra tags or information or anything that doesn't conform to the program stats) is deleted. It'd be nice if it did a append/edit, instead of completely rewriting the whole file.

I also noticed that the fanart select overwrites the locally stored fanart and there's no option to select locally stored fanart either. which is problematic for me, since i have usually anywhere from 2-16 locally stored fanarts for each movie in the movie folder that i've manually downloaded.

I guess i'd like more non-internet functionality all around, i use the internet secondarily to manage my info, i actually import my Information from Ant Movie Catalog with a script i've written for it. Although i like this program for being able to make edits and visually see what i may or may not be missing, or i might want to change in an nfo file.

Correction:
For some reason XBMC will NOT read thumbnail files for actors located in the directory with the file (which i consider an oversight), if you attempt to read the actor thumbs from the same directory it takes forever for the XBMC to update from an nfo.

see this topic for more info:
http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=35235

Ive just posted the following in that thread.

I've been looking into this for Media Companion and I was wondering if the path for actor thumbnails must be stored as a url.

My thinking is that it could be possible to store the files in a local folder on your PC eg.

C:\Program Files\Media Companion\Resources\Actors\

Then Media Companion could save movie actors in that location, maybe using the IMDB ID eg:- nm0005132.jpg for Heath Ledger

Making sure that the Actors folder is shared and available via SMB etc the path could be added to the nfo file instead of the url
eg

<actor>
<name>Heath Ledgername>
<role>The Joker</role>
<thumb>smb://Workgroup;user:password@username/Actors/nm0005132.jpg</thumb>
</actor>

I would appreciate it if someone could test this to see if it works.

spiff has just said that he would add the above system to XBMC.

This would mean that actors would then be able to be stored locally.

As I see it for movies they will all be saved in a single directory that can be selected by the user.

The Actor thumbs would be downloaded during the initial scrape of the movie, this will slow the scraper down, but the gain in browsing would be worth it.

The Actor thumbs would be saved as "nm0005132.jpg" so that each thumb only needs to be stored once. As your movie collection grows the speed of the scraper will increase as it will have to download less actor thumbs.

For TV shows, the same will apply for those who use IMDB as their source for actor thumbs. For those who get thumbs from TVDB then these will be saved in a actors subfolder in the main TV Show folder.


If anyone has any suggestions then please feel free.

so just double checking that we would need to share the folder with all these actor thumbs?

Does this mean MC will give us the option to input our own path so the XBOX can read it. IE. can i type in MC that the path is:

xbms://192.168.0.2:1400/##ActorThumbs##/

As I dont use SMB for my xbox, i use the above protocol.

That gives me another idea, it would be great if you could store all the NFO & TBNs (posters) & Fanarts for movie collection...in a seperate folder to where the movies actually sit. That would be neat!

Good Looking out Billy

appreciate the communication with XBMC team...

Allright

So i tried what you said, i can get XBMC to read the actor thumbs if there is a FULL PATH in the thumbs tag

For instance i've moved all of my Actor thumbs to J:\Media Resources\Actors.
So far its managed to pick it up by both the Path (J:\Media Resources\Actors\suchandso.tbn) and through samba (smb://Resources/Actors/suchandso.tbn) and locally on my xbox (F:\Resources\Actors\suchandso.tbn) so it doesn't neccessarily ave to be a URL, it just needs to be a full path in the <thumb> tag

but it won't work like so

Code:

<thumb>suchandso.tbn</thumb>

so can i confirm this is why XBMC takes so long to scan in new content even tho MC provides it all locally? coz of the Actor thumbs it has to pull from the net?