@darwindesign, appreciated your help earlier with fixing the dead-link movie posters when I did a clean OSMC install. One thing that occasionally bugs me when I do clean installs is that certain posters that were available in the past, and that I preferred, are not available now. So I’m thinking about how to secure my thumbnails against the vagaries of what the scapers provide and bypass the dead-link risk.
Is the solution as simple as me moving the userdata\thumbnails folder for one of my Kodi clients over to the NAS and using path substitution in advancedsettings.xml for all Kodi devices? If I’m doing a clean install I’d like the NAS thumbnails to be used instead of a fresh download (which either could break or force a poster change), and for this to work even there is a bad link (i.e. the client sees a local thumbnail, so it has no need to download it).
I’m hoping that simply moving the userdata\thumbnails combined with path substitution will do the job? I know I can back up/restore a Kodi device with its thumbnails, but I’m looking for a solution that is extremely durable.
You can’t do something so simplistic as what you are thinking. If you were just dealing with a single box with a non-shared db then you could just do a userdata backup including thumbs and use that to recover. With a shared MySQL it starts to get a bit more complicated. You could still do the same backup but you would have to recover texturecache 13.db and the thumbnails folder together. You cannot run the cache db through MySQL and you cannot share it between systems as SQLite does not support this. Because the texturecache13.db is independent on each system the thumbnail folder it is storing info about is also different so the thumbnail folder also cannot be shared even if your running MySQL.
You can also export your library in Kodi to single files and include thumbs. If you needed to rebuild your library in the future all your info will be there with thumbs. The artwork will be degraded though because this process just pulls the downsized art from the thumbnails folder and puts it along side your media files.
Similar to exporting from Kodi would be to use a program like tinyMediaManager to organize, generate nfo file, download full sized artwork, etc. There is a bit of a learning curve but it is quite powerful, done easier on a PC with a mouse and keyboard, and once you have everything you want you can just update your sources as you did before and everything is exactly as you set it with all the information about your files, stored with your files.
thanks @darwindesign for helping me avoid going down a dead-end. It’s a shame the master artwork can’t be part of the database itself.
I have previously exported my library to nfo files in order to be able to correct numerous inconsistent or even incorrect displayseason/displayepisode tags for TV Specials arising from bad data on thetvdb.com. Although default artwork via that scraper is subject to change, I rarely find that my preferred art has been pulled, whereas with the themoviedb scraper previous artwork seems to go missing all the time.
So it looks like I may need to start managing this centrally using a tool such as you suggest, I will look into that. Thanks again.
Appreciate there is nothing in the release notes for June OSMC that would suggest a fix had been found for the screen blanking issues discussed at length in this thread, but just confirming the issue is still present in the June release.
thanks, but this fell at the first fence with a 404 error. I don’t have BT Web Protect active so there shouldn’t be a block via my ISP.
osmc@V4Kplus:~$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall vero3-mediacenter-osmc
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
vero3-mediacenter-osmc
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 40 not upgraded.
Need to get 94.0 MB of archives.
After this operation, 4960 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Err:1 http://ftp.fau.de/osmc/osmc/apt stretch/main armhf vero3-mediacenter-osmc armhf 18.7.1-2
404 Not Found
E: Failed to fetch http://ftp.fau.de/osmc/osmc/apt/pool/main/v/vero3-mediacenter-osmc/vero3-mediacenter-osmc_18.7.1-2_armhf.deb 404 Not Found
E: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with --fix-missing?
I was able to run this first step and after a couple of successful stop/start events, I got a blank screen. Is there a way for me to revert without reinstalling January OSMC?
it may be tied to Kodi, but it appears to be a Kodi/Vero issue, as I just reconnected an OSMC Pi running the June release and it’s rock solid. I’ve never encountered this blank screen issue on a Pi.
I can look at logs tomorrow evening. Can you clarify which versions you want me to compare? This thread has lots of logs already, I think I ran out of permutations to try, but I’m fine to try one more round. The Vero is now on January OSMC but with Kodi updated, I can provide logs from that and then revert to a clean January install, or I can update it to the latest OSMC build first. Dropping down to January each time obviously is a bit of hassle but I’ve got the process down now and I’m normally back up again quite quickly.
If that’s all that’s needed to re-introduce the issues, then those are the only sets of logs I need to see. That also proves the issue is introduced by a Kodi change – because you’ve only updated Kodi.
On this occasion, the first blank screen event occurred on the first playback start (Marvel Avengers). Stopping playback recovered the display (I could also have changed input via my AVR remote and gone back, that works too). These blank screen events (with no sound) happen in an apparently random way, sometimes on start, sometimes on stop. They are not title-specific, e.g. sometimes I could start/stop Marvel Avengers without issue, other times a start or stop event could cause a blank screen.
This second log is from the Vero running clean January OSMC. I hit it with many start/stop events, covering a range of refresh rates and formats, everything worked perfectly.
I know nothing about Kodi/the Vero but noticed that in the log for the “bad” version of Kodi, there are numerous entries as follows (including one at the point of attempting to start playback). I can’t find any of these in the good log.