Two different icons for the same channel?

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

Hello,

I’ve had some troubles with channel icons in the past, and I’m back again, hat in hand. I’ve been careful, I think, to apply everything I’ve learned on this topic and my system is not behaving as it was in the past. Here is my current situation.

Some time ago, I noticed that the icon for a certain channel was not correct. It turns out that the associated station changed its network affiliation and hence its icon. I went through the process of downloading channel icons from their source and forcing a refresh in NextPVR. As a result, the correct icon displayed in NextPVR.

Next, I turned to Kodi, which I have running on the same Windows 10 PC on which NextPVR is running. I went to the kodi directory …/pvr.nextpvr and deleted all the .png files there. Then I chose to “Clear data” in Kodi, closed Kodi, then restarted it. As a result, the correct channel icon displayed for the subject channel.

Heady with success, I turned to OSMC running on the RPi 3B and performed exactly the same steps that I had performed in Kodi on Windows 10. Alas, upon deleting .png files from …/pvr.nextpvr, selecting Clear data, and restarting OSMC, the correct icon did not display in the guide or when I selected PVR/LiveTV>Channels and scrolled to the subject channel. However, when I navigate to Settings>LiveTV>General>Channel manager then scroll to the subject channel, I see the correct icon for that channel.

Thus, the icon for this channel is displayed inconsistently in OSMC, but not in Kodi. I suspect that there is something very simple I’m missing here, but I’ve scratched my head for a couple hours now and I can’t figure out what it might be.

Uploaded logs are here: paste.osmc.tv/usevuvizil

Thanks very much for any assistance.

2

Let me start by saying I know nothing about this very specific topic as I have never looked specifically at these logos. That being said it sounds like it is just a stale thumbnail image thing and likely will resolve itself once 24hrs have passed and Kodi looks to see if the source art has changed. If it doesn’t, or you are impatient, you would likely find success by deleting your thumbnail folder and restarting Kodi.

3

Thank you for the reply.

I’ll wait to see what happens in a day or two. What I thought was curious, and the reason why I posted a message here, was that it looks like Kodi inside OSMC is behaving differently from Kodi running on Windows 10. That suggested that there was something different about how channel icons are handled in OSMC from how they’re handled in “generic” Kodi.

In any event, this is no big deal for me.

4

Perhaps you just accessed these screens at different times on the two different Kodi’s so the update to the thumbnail was different. Kodi’s time for refreshing the thumbs is 24hrs so you wouldn’t need to wait any longer than that to see if it is going to update on its own.

5

Well, it’s been two days now and I’m still showing different icons as described above. I’ve selected “Clear data” from the Settings>General and Settings>Guide screens at least once per day for the last two days.

Interestingly, perhaps, I have two Pis, a 3B+ and a 3B. Both are running the latest version of OSMC. Both are connected to the same Windows 10 “server” running NextPVR. The 3B+ channel icon updated after about 24 hrs, upon selecing “Clear data” from the Settings>Guide screen. The log file I posted is from the 3B.

This problem is annoying to me but it’s really not a big deal. It doesn’t seem like a NextPVR or Kodi issue, since the icons show correctly within NextPVR and in “native” Kodi running on the same computer as NextPVR. Now I’ve proven to myself that it is a problem on one RPi but not another one. I suspect that I have some “setting” wrong someplace that is effectively forcing the wrong icon to show for this one channel on the 3B, but I’ve looked closely and can’t find one. I’m stumped.

I realize this is an obscure issue and I do appreciate any help I can get. Thanks.

6

Never mind! I just rebooted the Pi and the correct icon magically appeared. I had, of course, rebooted it several times during this process with no joy, and I have no idea why rebooting solved my problem now.

7

The cache I was referring to was Kodi’s thumbnail cache located in ~/.kodi/userdata/Thumbnails/ which you would normally manually delete via the terminal if the need arises. This cache is not shared between clients in a MySQL type setup and is independent of most add-ons including PVR’s.

8

Thank you, and I’ll keep this in mind if this happens again.

To help me understand, I had a look at this directory, and noted that it has sub-directories named 0-9, a-f, and Video. It’s not at all clear which of these directories or files contain channel icons. I’d be a bit fearful of deleting all of them.

Also, as I scanned this directory, I noted that none of the files in it were changed today. I guess that means the reboot I did that magically caused the correct icon to appear in PVR&LiveTV>Channels didn’t make any changes to any files in this directory.

The last time this happened, as noted, I deleted, via the terminal, the files in ~/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/pvr.nextpvr/ to force a refresh of the channel icons. That’s really all that’s in this directory. I used the same approach this time and it worked on the “native” Kodi instance running on my Windows machine and, eventually, the OSMC version on my other Pi. I note this for the record. Indeed, using this approach and clearing data as I described causes the correct icon to show in Settings>LiveTV>Channel manager but not in PVR&LiveTV>Channels. So, obviously, Kodi is getting icons in different places to display in these two areas – or something like that.

I appreciate your help. I now have another tool in the box to use in case this happens again.

9

There is nothing in those directories that won’t be re-cached after restart. Nothing to fear.

10

Generally speaking with Kodi, because again, I’ve never familiarized myself with these channel icons specifically, Kodi’s artwork cache works like this…

New art gets called up to the display and Kodi resizes it and displays it live like this from memory only and then starts the cache procedure. The original is resized and saved into the Thumbnail directory and information about this cached file is stored in a local database named texturecache13.db which is what Kodi uses to reference what cache file is attached to whatever asset. Additionally Kodi stores the location of the original artwork source in the main video database. Kodi will not normally go looking for changes to source files to kick off a cache file update, but if you do something like refresh a movie it will look at that point for an updated source file. When it does update a cached copy of artwork it then will not try to do it again for that particular source file name for 24hrs.

If you manually delete the Thumbnails folder (and restart Kodi) when it attempts to bring up art from the cache it will see it missing and then make a new cached copy using the source location that was stored in the main video database. Thus for most people who are not running a many years old database using online scraping sources that have moved files creating a bunch of dead links, the artwork all shows up as it had before with just a bit of a delay as it retrieves and recaches from the source.

Hopefully that may provide some insight into what may be going on. You would need something in Kodi to go looking for an update the source to recache and it would need to not be within 24hrs of when it updated the old art last. There may also perhaps be something about the artwork being memory resident and a reboot being needed before it pulls the updated artwork anew from the cache. Above is the best of my understanding of how this works and has been reliable for troubleshooting the odd occasion when these artwork issues have come up on my boxes. Don’t take the above as a definitive source though as it is just pieced together info and observations over many years of using Kodi on different platforms.

11

Thanks very much for your insight on how Kodi works with artwork, and hence with channel icons. I’ll keep it in mind next time this happens.

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