Thumbnails Are Replacing Posters -- Can't Fix

[newoski]

Hi Guys,

New user, but longtime Kodi user. Running on a ATV4K (1st gen) and about 2/3 of my movies are scanning in without posters, despite poster.jpg existing in the folder. Moreoever, if I manually select the poster.jpg as the poster, it gets added and I can see it added to the selection GUI, but then when I go back to the main movies view, it only shows up for a split second before being overwritten by the thumbnail. Deleting the thumbnail seems to have no effect, it just comes right back...

Totally stumped...

[Waltman]

Assuming your poster have “poster” in the name and are jpg

Did you try:
the clean thumbnails option in
Settings -> video ->library -> clean thumbnails
And
The regenerate thumbnails option in -> settings -> appearance -> cached images -> regenerate thumbnails.

[newoski]

Ya, no improvement. Same exact problem, if I regenerate. It shows the thumbnail and then if I replace the thumbnail by manually selecting the poster.jpg, it shows for a split second and then reverts to thumbnail...

[Waltman]

Ah………yes, I believe this is an older problem that has never been quite resolved. Mrmc displays thumbnails instead of the poster if a tv-show thumbnail or season thumbnail is present.

https://mrmc.tv/forum/viewtopic.php?p=28187#p28187

I assume the poster is replaced by the thumbnail? And it looks as in my post above ?

1. Try with one tv-show, remove the tv-show and season thumbnails. So only poster, season-poster an banners remain. Refresh the series. It should be resolved.

2. Try selecting the poster at the thumbnail art, but that is quite an undertaking.

Mrmc is not handling the thumbnail correct. So I removed them all.

[newoski]

Thanks, thanks a good idea for a workaround. Easy mass duplicate and rename fix. That said, this is for Movies, not TV Shows...

[Waltman]

Thanks, thanks a good idea for a workaround. Easy mass duplicate and rename fix. That said, this is for Movies, not TV Shows...

All the movie thumbs I have are using the landscape name. That way in movie information -> choose art, the poster is also used for the thumb.

[jkhabe]

I've been having the exact same/similar issue with movie posters (never TV posters) for some time. Everything will be fine for a while and then some of my posters get replaced with thumbnails (note: the posters are still in their respective movie folders). Fanart background shot is never affected, only posters.

I've tried some of the same suggestions above such as cleaning thumbnails but, that does nothing. I have to resort to doing an individual refresh of each affected movie, using "local information", and the stored posters come back. That can be a real pain as sometimes it might only be 10 corrupted posters, sometimes 30 or more but, I still have to scroll through 1400+ movies to locate them all and fix each one individually.

Is there a way to "refresh ALL movies" at once from the locally stored info? That would at least make things a little easier... I've looked and tried different things but nothing I can find refreshes all movies.

[Waltman]

I've been having the exact same/similar issue with movie posters (never TV posters) for some time. Everything will be fine for a while and then some of my posters get replaced with thumbnails (note: the posters are still in their respective movie folders). Fanart background shot is never affected, only posters.

I've tried some of the same suggestions above such as cleaning thumbnails but, that does nothing. I have to resort to doing an individual refresh of each affected movie, using "local information", and the stored posters come back. That can be a real pain as sometimes it might only be 10 corrupted posters, sometimes 30 or more but, I still have to scroll through 1400+ movies to locate them all and fix each one individually.

Is there a way to "refresh ALL movies" at once from the locally stored info? That would at least make things a little easier... I've looked and tried different things but nothing I can find refreshes all movies.

Not to my knowledge, the Only way is to drop the source and start over fresh. Please remove or rename all your thumbnails to landscape or the problem will persist.

[jkhabe]

Waltman, sorry but I am not exactly following what you are asking me to do by "remove or rename all your thumbnails to landscape".

I have MrMC setup to use a MySQL database on the networked homeserver. Additionally, I periodically export the complete video library (separate files option) as a backup using the "Export Video Library" option in MrMC. On my server, this gives me [movie name].nfo, [movie name]-fanart.jpg & [movie name]-poster.jpc files.

I am unclear as to where this issue lies. Is it on the AppleTV 4K, in the MySQL database or in the server files. I can't see the individual files stored on the ATV4K (is it possible to FTP into an ATV4K???). I also haven't looked into whether or not I can see the individual files in the MySQL database.

When I look at a movies info on MrMC, I see three artwork items; 1. Poster, 2. Fanart, 3. Thumbnail.

I always assumed that MySQL would rebuild/restore the database on the device if there were issues. Where exactly am I supposed to rename thumbnails to "landscape"? I'm bumming at the thought of dropping the source and starting over as I have a lot of my movies renamed/ordered/grouped the way I like them and I'm not feeling so confident in MySQL right now.

Note: My thumbnail issue has gotten really bad in the last day or so...

[Waltman]

I just use finder / windows explorer on a computer to navigate were the files are stored to manage my files. And a renamed tool for batch renaming

My structure on my share
Movies
Alien
Alien.mkv
Alien.nfo
Alien-poster.jpg
Alien-fanart.jpg
Alien-landscape.jpg <- this is the thumbnail probably name alien-thumb.jpg

This is a cached images / FileName problem and I don’t have a fully documented walkthrough. I went to it myself some time ago, but I solved it doing a lot of things. You should try these steps and go with the least work option. I had some manual labored sets before this and I had to rebuild it all. And I mad solid nfo files to prevent future trouble.

In you specific case
1. I would single out 2 or three movies with this problem with mrmc and focus to get it right before trying a mass solution
2. Go to a movie folder that has the problem
3. With file explorer find the thumbnail file. Rename it to landscape.
4. Go to mrmc, quit mrmc and restart and update library
5. Go to the movie in mrmc, movie information, choose art > the poster and thumbnail should be the same, but probably not yet
6. Manually refresh movie info. Check if the poster and thumbnail are the same,

if not there are some steps you can do:
OR manually change this thumb to the poster, choose art, thumb, point to poster.jpg
OR remove the movie from library and update library (worst case step by step scenario if you have a large library)
OR you could rebuild the cached images in setting > appearance > cached images
OR just delete the thumbnail, reboot Apple TV and restart mrmc and update library
OR worst case should be last resort, full rescan after dropping the source.

Now if some this works, you could try
repeat the process with more movies and build toward you solution.

In all cases update library will scan the data to the MySQL so that should be fine, you just have to get rid of the *.thumb.jpg reference