Do I misunderstand the concept of the thumbcache or is it just flawed in shared setup

Do I misunderstand the concept of the thumbcache or is it just flawed in shared setup - Printable Version

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Do I misunderstand the concept of the thumbcache or is it just flawed in shared setup - Dark-Sider - 2022-07-24

Hi,

I have the most basic shared Kodi setup. I have to HTPCs in two different rooms and a central storage server in the basement. The Media is sitting on a SMB share in the basement while both Windows 10 HTPCs connect with the same user/password the SMB share. The storage server also hosts a centralized maria db for sharing the library and the "watched" status of media.

The thin is, I use one of my HTPCs very rarely. As I fired it up again just recently I upgraded both clients to the latest matrix release. However I noticed that a lot of artwork and thumbnails etc on the rarely used machine is missing (because of changed URLs). I did some digging around this forum and found, that the thumbcache is independent for each client, if the thumbs are not in the local cache they are downloaded from an external url. If that URL is not valid anymore stuff breaks.

This is a design flaw in my opinion. Kodi already supports a central SQL database and Media on network share(s). Why aren't those thumbnails just stored alongside the media in ".kodi" directory and refreneced in the centralized SQL database?

Am I missing the point here or is there a better way to do it?

thx
Dark-Sider

RE: Do I misunderstand the concept of the thumbcache or is it just flawed in shared setup - scott967 - 2022-07-25

Whether or not it's a flaw, there have long been addons and third-party apps that create local copies of URL art. Currently artwork dump addon is widely used for this purpose.

Alternative is within Kodi do a library export -- that will save the thumbnail versions of the URL art (but thumbnail is not bit-equivalent to original).

scott s.
.

RE: Do I misunderstand the concept of the thumbcache or is it just flawed in shared setup - jbinkley60 - 2022-07-25

There are also other sharing solutions which will host the Kodi artwork, metadata and content on a central server for all Kodi and non-Kodi clients. This leaves Kodi to be what it does best, be the best media rendering client available. Each media sharing solution has its pros and cons.

Jeff

RE: Do I misunderstand the concept of the thumbcache or is it just flawed in shared setup - Dark-Sider - 2022-07-25

Hi,

thanks, I found that https://kodi.wiki/view/Artwork with the links to Artwork Beef and Artwork Dump. As I'm using Matrix I need to Artwork Dump. I didn't realize that syncing of artwork has to be done via addons / 3rd party stuff. If there is an even more sophisticated solution than artwork dump please point me to it.

thx,
Dark-Sider

RE: Do I misunderstand the concept of the thumbcache or is it just flawed in shared setup - sarbes - 2022-07-25

The cache you were describing is a texture cache. Textures formats and sizes may differ depending on the skin and system, so they can be incompatible. Such a cache is unique to a system.

It is not intended to save the original artwork.

RE: Do I misunderstand the concept of the thumbcache or is it just flawed in shared setup - jjd-uk - 2022-07-27

If you want to avoid missing art due to dead URL's then you should do a periodic library export so you have local copies (by local I mean on your home storage along with your media files). I've never used them, but from what I understand an addon such as Artwork Dump simply makes sure the artwork is downloaded, so you don't need to remember to do a periodic library export to export the arkwork if nothing else has changed.

RE: Do I misunderstand the concept of the thumbcache or is it just flawed in shared setup - Dark-Sider - 2022-07-28

(2022-07-27, 15:36)jjd-uk Wrote: If you want to avoid missing art due to dead URL's then you should do a periodic library export so you have local copies (by local I mean on your home storage along with your media files). I've never used them, but from what I understand an addon such as Artwork Dump simply makes sure the artwork is downloaded, so you don't need to remember to do a periodic library export to export the arkwork if nothing else has changed.

Well I would prefer to store the full-res artwork not just the optimized version (you never know). With media (at least TV / Movies) taking up terabytes of storage, I don't care too much about some PNGs or JPGs.

Just to makes sure: If I was to use artwork dump on 2 machines, only one machine would actually download the artwork, and the other machine would then grab from the media share and not download it from the URL it originated from?

I really feel like this should be a basic kodi thing though:
- Do you want to have your artwork / fan-art saved alongside your media (yes/no),
- What resolution do you want it saved (original, 4k, 2k, 480p)

bye
Darky