I’ve recently done some backup and restores and I gather that can mess up artwork. Rather, it has messed up my artwork.
There are too many movies that are showing black screens for the poster and background art to go through and manually refresh, and I’d prefer to not have to scan in the entire source again. All my TV shows are fine and updated the artwork suitably when browsing them.
However, many of the movies that are showing black for the artwork have a poster and fanart file in their folder, e.g. either NAME-poster.jpg or just poster.jpg or both in some instances. Despite those being there, they are not being loaded. I’m guessing this is due to the database pointing to somewhere else for the artwork rather than looking locally.
Is there a quick fix for this?
I also remember various artwork downloaders that I used to use, which worked great, but neither of them (artwork downloader or artwork beef) are supported any more. Is there anything like that available?
I will rescan the sources if I have to, but I really, really don’t want to as that will mean going through it again marking all the watched things as watched again, and re-doing all my movie sets again as some I have different from the standard and it is all just so cumbersome to have to do again!
Just realised the Vero that I made the backup on has all the artwork ok.
The one I restored to is the one with the artwork issue.
Is there an easy way to copy the artwork stored locally from one Vero to another?
I tried running a backup of settings but with only the thumbnails folder selected for backup, but I don’t think it backed them up as the backup finished quite quickly and the status while it was doing it didn’t seem to mention thumbnails.
You could manually copy the Kodi directory – that should get everything.
Yeah, it took me WAAAAY to long to think of that. Unfortunately I thought of it after I rescanned my movies library.
I’ve made such a balls up of managing my veros and library at the moment!!
On the local machine there is a ~.kodi/userdata/Thumbnails folder and a db at ~/.kodi/userdata/Database/Textures13.db which normally you would want to delete when you redo your library. If you delete them and restart Kodi the thumbs will automatically be recreated on demand. Any posters that go missing when you delete the cache would be because the path stored in the sql db from where the file came from is no longer valid (this is the case for both local or online art) which keeps it from making a new copy. If someone is using a shared MySQL db setup it is possible to stop Kodi and copy those two things from one install to another and it should work. This can act as a workaround for missing artwork issue. Personally I think it is better to just refresh the items from the full screen information window so you don’t have to maintain what will sure to be an increasingly bloated thumbnail cache over time that takes way too long to copy from client to client.
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Thanks. I actually got it all sorted as I remembered I’d backed up my MySql database at teh start of the month, so I imported that back in, and then all the cover art and background art was back to normal. Not entirely sure why that worked as that wouldn’t have changed the local folders or textures db. But at the moment, who am I to complain!
But with everything I’ve been playing around with lately, and issues that I’ve been trying to fix, I think at some point I am going to completely start from scratch again to get a new clean install and scraped library. But not today.
Will that require removing all the .nfo files and artwork in the movie/tv show folders, so that each folder is just the video file, and then let the scraper do the rest? Or will it be ok to have some nfo files for some movies that I want grouped in a non-standard set?
The movies shouldn’t be an issue regarding nfo files normally as they probably were, and will continue to be scraped from TMDB. Individual episodes of TV shows also shouldn’t be an issue with local files as the only urls they have normally are to art that most would have sitting locally and therefore never get used. The issue I was referring to in the other thread is just any tvshow.nfo files you have in the root of your individual shows. These are important as if they contain a link to source the info from TVDB and you set your scraper to TMDB then any episodes that don’t have their own local info will not get added due to not having a valid online link to the shows scraping source.
If you have a show that is already canceled and you have local info for all episodes then it is fine to use the old tvshow.nfo file. I would recommend deleting the <episodeguide> tag as that has caused some issues in the past (ie purposely removing the online link since you are not going to need it). I have a few show I keep like this due to not wanting it how TMDB has some titles (like wanting SG1 movies as specials in the show instead of separated in the movie library).
The way I personally would do it is on a PC connect Kodi to a new db name and setup everything there. I think it is a bit more convenient and quicker to mess around with a mouse and a keyboard than a remote with this mass library editing kind of thing. Once your happy with how things work on the new db on your PC then you just go to the clients and change the db name in advancedsettings.xml, delete the artwork cache, and start Kodi back up. About the only complication I see for you is that you are using local mounts. because of this you would need to (unless your PC is actually Linux with the same mounts) need to add a path sub to Kodi so the db stores as mnt/media... even though you would probably be accessing this share via (I’m assuming) //nasname/something.