LinuxMCE Forums

General => Users => Topic started by: k84 on April 19, 2007, 03:10:39 pm

Title: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: k84 on April 19, 2007, 03:10:39 pm
Hi,

I got a couple of music videos, would it be possible to automatically add a thumbnail to those, e,g after let's say 20sec out in the movie?
Would take time to do this automatically, and if i'd upgrade the media-library i'd allways have to add this manually.

Any thought/suggestions on this`?

Best regards,
K84
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: efiniti on May 02, 2007, 10:37:35 pm
Yeah would anyone have a clue in setting this up?  It would definitely be sweet to have some images for tv shows.
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: itspac on July 06, 2008, 04:55:44 pm
Brought this one back up. I had the same question. and snever say an answer
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: tschak909 on July 06, 2008, 07:46:39 pm
Why does nobody think this through?

Come on, guys.

The point of the graphic icons for each, is to attach a picture of the DVD jacket, or show logo, etc.. So you _KNOW_ what it is!

What happens, when you've got several thousand thumbnails, 20 seconds or so into the movie? you can no longer tell what they are, short of scanning the icon, and then looking at the name.

http://i113.photobucket.com/albums/n223/sub_pop/Screenshots/Miscellaneous/Screenshot_totem-video-thumbnailer_.png

'nuff said.

come on guys, USE YOUR HEADS!

-Thom
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: itspac on July 07, 2008, 01:59:41 am
I have a bunch of of videos which are not dvd movies. Example. Short cartoons not from dvd and home videos. So I did think it out
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: colinjones on July 07, 2008, 03:21:04 am
I agree with Thom - whatever the source material videos or DVDs, it doesn't change the fact that randomly choosing a frame an arbitrary number of seconds into the media file is going to generate thumbnails that are far more often useless than useful!

I think it would create screen clutter that would be meaningless, and annoy far more people than it would help. The ugly text may not be pretty, but at least its consistent and doesn't confuse the eye.
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: tschak909 on July 07, 2008, 03:51:35 am
with that said, hopefully we'll be able to make something unintrusive and useful for the replacement skin.

-Thom
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: itspac on July 08, 2008, 03:23:04 pm
fine, If you don't like auto thumbnail. How bout giving the same option to take a thumbnail from an orbitor that there is on the media director. without having to interrupt the video of course.
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: bulek on July 08, 2008, 04:05:32 pm
fine, If you don't like auto thumbnail. How bout giving the same option to take a thumbnail from an orbitor that there is on the media director. without having to interrupt the video of course.
Hi,

one option is to use Make Thumbnail or something like that under UI2 (I'm not sure if UI1 has that option)....

I disagree on auto thumbnail feature. Kids have no problem recognizing automatically created thumbnails for cartoons and me too - specially cause movie titels are pretty unreadable if you have bright bakcground on UI2 with alpha blending. I think that auto thumbnail is better than no thumbnail... User can correct auto thumbnails with above feature later if he wants...

Here's a good starting point (similar could be done for LMCE) :

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Generatevideothumbs.pl (http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Generatevideothumbs.pl)


Regards,

Bulek.
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: tschak909 on July 08, 2008, 04:37:12 pm
sorry, I'm taking a hard stance on this one. The research is on my side.

-Thom
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: jondecker76 on July 08, 2008, 04:56:07 pm
you can already have the orbiter take a screenshot to use as a thumbnail. Between this, the ability to download from amazon.com and the ability to upload your own image, I think its already pretty feature-rich in that department
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: rrambo on July 08, 2008, 05:29:48 pm
I do have a question though..  as I've used linuxmce, mythtv and xbmc/linux and they all have different methods of retrieving cover art...  both xbmc and mythtv use imdb for movie info and cover art...  both seem to work much better than what you get from amazon with linuxmce..

The method that xbmc uses is by far the best.. (please don't say, "then use xbmc")..  anyway, once you setup a video source, you set content (select Movies for example), then choose where you want to retrieve the info from (there are several different ones, I only use imdb) then it scans the entire directory and updates all the matches automatically...  Of my approximately 600 movies, I would say it matches about 85% correctly.. about 5% incorrectly and then it leaves about 10% blank...  the good part, is that you can change the coverart directly from the UI, and that manual process of fixing the ones that are incorrect works 99.9% of the time...  so, I guess my question is, why not use imdb as an option, and be able to update coverart and info directly from the UI?
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: tschak909 on July 08, 2008, 05:36:43 pm
changing to do cover art from imdb would be a relatively simple fix for the web admin.

However, there is a mechanism that you guys aren't aware of as well... the External Media Identifier.

the EMI is called when discs are inserted into your DVD drive, either audio or DVD video.

The disc's fingerprint is calculated, and results are sent off to Windows Media Services (yes..), and a resulting cover art is retrieved, along with data for chapters, tracks, etc. There is currently not a free service out there that does this.

As for updating cover art on the GUI, we have to be very careful about adding user facing complexity. With the web admin, all administration functions are clearly separated from USING the system, and it should stay this way... With that said, the web admin needs some serious rewriting, retrofitting, etc.. Thanks Jondecker76 for working on this!

-Thom
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: rrambo on July 08, 2008, 05:46:48 pm

As for updating cover art on the GUI, we have to be very careful about adding user facing complexity. With the web admin, all administration functions are clearly separated from USING the system, and it should stay this way... With that said, the web admin needs some serious rewriting, retrofitting, etc.. Thanks Jondecker76 for working on this!

-Thom


I understand about keeping complexity away from the UI..  I don't feel like the method xbmc uses is too "in your face" though..  for example, to actually view the movie info, you press Info on the MCE remote which pulls up the actual movie info, then there is a button at the bottom of the screen to rescan..  you also have the option to change the name of the movie for the lookup from the remote and an on-screen keyboard that pops up..  then, a list of matches comes up, you select the appropriate one, and it's done..

Not difficult at all..  and I feel almost a necessity for any media center solution.

Just my .02...
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: bulek on July 08, 2008, 05:56:17 pm
sorry, I'm taking a hard stance on this one. The research is on my side.

-Thom

opinion accepted ... Can you please post some links - I'm curious and would also like to read more on this one...

Regards,

Bulek.
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: colinjones on July 08, 2008, 10:33:07 pm
Was wondering what the EMI was... So as its not free, I guess it isn't actually doing anything for us at the moment? How well does it work when it is working? Particularly for non-US (versions of) movies? Amazon is fully in the US-is-the-centre-of-the-universe camp, currently in this respect.
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: tschak909 on July 09, 2008, 12:51:34 am
read what I said, again.

The EMI uses Windows Media Services to identify _DISCS_ ... NOT AMAZON.

And actually EMI works very damned well. Put in a disc to see what i mean.

-Thom
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: freymann on July 09, 2008, 01:10:36 am
read what I said, again.

The EMI uses Windows Media Services to identify _DISCS_ ... NOT AMAZON.

And actually EMI works very damned well. Put in a disc to see what i mean.

-Thom

 When I was testing the 7.10Release (which I'm running now with great success), I grabbed some of my store bought DVD's and inserted them into a MD.

 It came up and started playing the DVD... I click the green media button to bring up the menu (or F7 on keyboard) and told it to copy the DVD. When it was done everything was packaged up nicely for me, including cover art and attributes.

 To me, the EMI thing worked perfectly.

 I haven't ripped a music CD as I've already done them long ago using Windows Media Player and have dumped my music collection into the system. I really don't care about cover art on my music collection, I usually just hit Play All, then Random and pay no attention to the monitor/tv.

 I've also found that adding my own cover art (to videos), when amazon lookup doesn't work, quite easy.

 I just open up another tab in my web browser and go to imdb and search for whatever, then bring up the cover art, right click on it, copy location, and paste that into the LMCE web page (under Files & Media > Media & Files Sync). I find it quite easy to add performers or the long synopsis when needed too.

 I find this very simple to do. Amazon doesn't miss much from my collection, but when it does, it just pop open a browser tab, get the info, paste it into LMCE admin. Can't get much easier than that to me!?

 If you want a thumbnail directly from your video, while it's playing you can bring up the menu with the green media button or F7 keyboard and click on the Thumbnail option at whatever point you want to grab an image. Again, it's so simple.

 Granted, if you dump in a large collection of music or video and then want to auto populate the database with all your cover art and attributes automatically, that's a different story.

 There are plenty of scripts available from the MythTV project that do that... I would look into seeing if those scripts are compatible with LMCE and if not, perhaps trying to fine tune them for use here.
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: colinjones on July 09, 2008, 04:39:49 am
read what I said, again.

The EMI uses Windows Media Services to identify _DISCS_ ... NOT AMAZON.

And actually EMI works very damned well. Put in a disc to see what i mean.

-Thom

Thom - I don't need to read what you said again, I got it the first time - I realise you are talking about _disks_. What I didn't understand was you said there currently isn't a free service out there that does this. So I assumed that EMI wasn't being used because it wasn't a free service (WMS), and so some other mechanism is being used to grab that data. Still not sure what you were referring to as not having a free version of...
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: tschak909 on July 09, 2008, 05:40:30 am
meaning we do not have source code.

-Thom
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: royw on July 09, 2008, 07:47:49 am
And actually EMI works very damned well. Put in a disc to see what i mean.

Where EMI is weak is on older disks and less popular disks.  Also it's aggravating to put a single movie disk in and have it identified as part of a multi-movie pack.  Classic example is Kill Bill vol 1 (ISBN 786936-226997) and vol 2 (ISBN 786936-245783).  Two separately packaged and purchased DVDs.  LinuxMCE identifies both as the twin pack with poor cover art.  Amazon lookup gives the twin pack or the Japanese releases, again with poor cover art.

Also wherever the title comes from, there are a few percent with errors like extra/missing prefixes("A", "An", "The"), "and" changed to "&" (and vice versa).

I'd say EMI works good (when you have a good internet connection) and with a mostly reasonable lookup time, but the retrieved meta data needs improvement (too often missing the title or genres).

Personally, I've been very pleased with both the cover art and meta data now that I'm sync'ing my LinuxMCE database from my DVD Profiler database.

Have fun,
Roy
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: tschak909 on July 09, 2008, 01:20:21 pm
if we were to use dvd profiler, we would need to find a way of properly fingerprinting the discs (the EMI uses some freaky hashing algorithm which it passes to the web service on the other end..)

Please look at media identifiers and the commands needed to implement, to do this right.

-Thom
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: itspac on July 09, 2008, 03:31:04 pm
you can already have the orbiter take a screenshot to use as a thumbnail. Between this, the ability to download from amazon.com and the ability to upload your own image, I think its already pretty feature-rich in that department

Am i missing something/ i have a Nokia N800 as an orbiter and I dont see that option when I am watching media. I know the on screen orbiter does for the media director, but you have to interrupt the video to use it.
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: bulek on July 09, 2008, 04:03:00 pm
you can already have the orbiter take a screenshot to use as a thumbnail. Between this, the ability to download from amazon.com and the ability to upload your own image, I think its already pretty feature-rich in that department

Am i missing something/ i have a Nokia N800 as an orbiter and I dont see that option when I am watching media. I know the on screen orbiter does for the media director, but you have to interrupt the video to use it.
AFAIK, this feature is only available on UI2.

Regards,

Bulek.
Title: Re: Thumbnail / Cover-Art.
Post by: royw on July 10, 2008, 01:41:41 am
if we were to use dvd profiler, we would need to find a way of properly fingerprinting the discs (the EMI uses some freaky hashing algorithm which it passes to the web service on the other end..)

Please look at media identifiers and the commands needed to implement, to do this right.

-Thom

I don't look at DVD Profiler as a practical solution for LinuxMCE, but more of as a band-aid to get good meta data and cover art.  It's drawbacks include that it is windows based (but does work under wine) shareware designed for DVD, HDDVD, & BD library management, which it does very well.  It does not support ripping or playing of media.  That said, there are some really good features that we should consider. 

* When you add a media to your collection, it syncs the identifiers (title, ISBN, disc ids) from the main site, then all of your additions are looked up locally.  This allows you to rapidly add by title, by ISBN, or by disc id.  On the rare times that a disc is not in the database, you can create an entry, fill in what you can, then optionally upload it to the main site.  If you find an error or omission, you can edit and optionally submit to the main site.

If we sync'ed the identifiers with cron.daily, then there wouldn't be the 10-60 second lookup delay when ripping nor the failures due to net outages.

* It supports updating your media profiles from the main site.  This allows your collection's meta data to improve over time.  Note, it does support locking of parts of your meta data to prevent override.

Another cron.daily task, then forget about it. 

* It depends on user support for the meta data.  Not a corporate entity that favours matching commercially available media (multi-packs) and has no interest in complete meta data.

The extensions to the LinuxMCE database would include adding a "media unique" identifier and "media last changed on main site" timestamp to pluto_media.file, then add some locking attributes (lock genres, lock cast, lock cover art,...).

I'm not sure if SqlCVS would be the way to handle the sync'ing.

Food for thought.

Have fun,
Roy