How to best fix my covers/art/etc?

How to best fix my covers/art/etc? - Printable Version

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How to best fix my covers/art/etc? - redec - 2020-06-24

So...I've gotten my library art into a bit of a mess it seems, and I'm not sure how best to fix it, or what the ideal setup even is. I'm not entirely a newb, but when it comes to metadata I basically am - I don't really understand how metadata works in the system as a whole, or how to manipulate it to my will...so, I'm looking for a bit of advice

First, some background of how my library has evolved - I used to use windows media center with the MyMovies extension...when I jumped ships to kodi many years ago I did an NFO (or xml?) export from MyMovies, kodi picked them up magically and it worked awesome, I never looked back. Then, not knowing any better I ran for a couple years with a content provider which had a "write kodi metadata" option enabled...not sure exactly what that did, but it got to be pretty unreliable so I eventually turned it off, and since then kodi has been providing the metadata, and it has been working very well.

I'm running a setup of 3 raspberry pi frontends all serving up content from a common networked backend....today I tried to add a 4th rpi frontend, and here's where my problems started. When the new one comes up, it is missing a bunch of the movie covers and actor profile pics etc....my other 3 frontends still display everything fine. Looking in the log file I see a bunch of errors something like "Unable to load https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/5K63RAJq6iwnOSM8ADpj9ARzIxq.jpg"...and indeed that file does not exist. it seems tmdb has purged/moved a bunch of images that I was referencing....BOOOO. But ok, now what do I do? I don't really know what tools are available to help with this...I don't really want to go through all my content 1 by 1 and hit the "Refresh" button...that would take a long time, and ideally (I think?) I'd like to maintain the images that it has and just be able to fill in what's missing...I find when refreshing, it frequently happens that I liked my old cover better than the one it updated to and now my old one is gone with no way to get it back (altho many of them are pretty low res, so I guess somehow refreshing all of them wouldn't be the worst thing). Should all my frontends be sharing a networked metadata store? I think I remember reading about that being possible....but I want my frontends to be as snappy as possible, and I expect pulling the images across the network when browsing would be noticeably slower than local storage...if I took one of the local metadata stores from one of my other frontends, put it on the network, and then pointed the new one to that, would it just all magically work and my problems would be over?

Bonus points: I'm switching to a new theme that makes use of backgrounds ("fanart"?), and most of my content does not have that populated...is there a way to populate fanart for existing library items?

RE: Help! How to best fix my covers/art/etc? - Karellen - 2020-06-24

(2020-06-24, 00:32)redec Wrote: it seems tmdb has purged/moved a bunch of images that I was referencing....BOOOO

Yes. Many users have reported the same issue but it is out of our hands. TheMovieDB admins have confirmed there was a mass purge of artwork, but have refused to discuss the reason behind the purge. Even some friendly mods at the site are not privy to the reason.

(2020-06-24, 00:32)redec Wrote: But ok, now what do I do?

Not a lot of options when the artwork has been removed from the provider and you do not have local artwork. Two options...

1. Install Artwork Beef addon and configure it to run through your library and add missing artwork. There is also an option to save the artwork locally, so you don't have that problem again in future.
2. Remove your sources one at a time, answer Yes when asked to Remove from Library. Then run a Clean Library. Now re-scrape that Source back into the library.

(2020-06-24, 00:32)redec Wrote: Should all my frontends be sharing a networked metadata store?

You can, but the main benefit of that is sharing play counts, watched status etc. If that does not worry you, then keep them separate.

(2020-06-24, 00:32)redec Wrote: if I took one of the local metadata stores from one of my other frontends, put it on the network, and then pointed the new one to that, would it just all magically work and my problems would be over?

Probably not, but I am not sure of your exact setup. Keep in mind that Paths saved in the database are relative. So when moving to a different machine that has a different address, they most likely will not work.

(2020-06-24, 00:32)redec Wrote: Bonus points: I'm switching to a new theme that makes use of backgrounds ("fanart"?), and most of my content does not have that populated...is there a way to populate fanart for existing library items?

Artwork Beef

(2020-06-24, 00:32)redec Wrote: I don't really understand how metadata works in the system as a whole, or how to manipulate it to my will

NFO files, or install the Metadata Editor add-on... https://kodi.tv/addon/program-add-ons-scripts/metadata-editor

RE: Help! How to best fix my covers/art/etc? - redec - 2020-06-24

Cool, thanks I will definitely check out Artwork Beef and the Metadata Editor.

(2020-06-24, 01:16)Karellen Wrote: You can, but the main benefit of that is sharing play counts, watched status etc. If that does not worry you, then keep them separate.

Sorry, I guess I meant should I have them sharing a common texture cache? I already do have them all accessing a common MySQL database. Is there a way to configure it so that the scraper would download and save all the artwork alongside the media at scrape-time, and then the individual frontends would load/cache them from there?

RE: Help! How to best fix my covers/art/etc? - Karellen - 2020-06-24

I don't know much about mysql setups, but you could try <pathsubstitution> pointing to a common cache... https://kodi.wiki/view/Path_substitution

RE: Help! How to best fix my covers/art/etc? - redec - 2020-06-24

(2020-06-24, 01:16)Karellen Wrote: 1. Install Artwork Beef addon and configure it to run through your library and add missing artwork

Well shucks, this does not seem to work....Artwork Beef populated the fanart and whatnot quite nicely, but it did not fix the broken posters+actor images. I'm guessing it sees that there's a URL already and thus assumes that the artwork is already present, and does not check that the url is actually functional. But for some reason it also replaced a bunch of posters which were already present...so....yeah I'm really not sure what it did. It also broke some which were working before - it replaced some correct posters with like random screenshots, and when I tried to set the artwork it manually afterwards it said it couldn't determine what movie it is....but then if I do the built-in kodi "Refresh" on it it works fine and I get proper covers again. I really don't know what's going on...I'm scared to leave this thing running if it's going to randomly break working covers when it runs Undecided

RE: How to best fix my covers/art/etc? - Karellen - 2020-06-24

Ok, then disable it so you don't get any more unexpected results.

Your only option now is to rescrape those affected movies.

RE: How to best fix my covers/art/etc? - redec - 2020-06-24

(2020-06-24, 23:19)Karellen Wrote: Ok, then disable it so you don't get any more unexpected results.

Your only option now is to rescrape those affected movies.

Thanks for your help Smile

RE: How to best fix my covers/art/etc? - redec - 2020-06-26

(2020-06-24, 23:19)Karellen Wrote: Ok, then disable it so you don't get any more unexpected results.

Your only option now is to rescrape those affected movies.

So actually...I'm thinking I'm going to write a little util that spins through the art table and tests each url...and if it 404s sets it to "not set"...I notice there's some records in there with an empty url...do you happen to know, is the proper way to "unset" a record to set url="" or to delete the whole record?

RE: How to best fix my covers/art/etc? - Klojum - 2020-06-26

(2020-06-26, 17:10)redec Wrote: I notice there's some records in there with an empty url...do you happen to know, is the proper way to "unset" a record to set url="" or to delete the whole record?

The default value for the url field in the art table is NULL.