2020-06-24, 00:32
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/5K63...ARzIxq.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?
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/5K63...ARzIxq.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?
