[Klojum]

Are you always fine with doing things twice? Because I don't think that this is the best solution.
I'm gonna send the other thread to the bin, and move this one to the OS Independent forum section.

[jubilex]

It appears Android is the problem.

Using the same advancedsettings.xml with same passwords.xml, same path substitution, same shared SMB Thumbnails folder, same username/pass, my Windows Kodi had no problem doing the substitution, regenerating the thumbnails in the SMB folder, and had neither the errors in the early "creating folder special://profile/thumbails" section nor the later "opening for writing" of the actual thumbnail jpgs to the SMB. So perhaps those errors together create the problem I'm having?

With a fresh Kodi install on Android phone, I deleted Thumbnails and Textures13.db, copied in the same sources.xml, passwords.xml, and advancedsettings.xml. So I've now started at the same point with the same xmls on 2 android devices (Fire Tv 4k stick and Samsung phone) and 2 non-android devices (Windows 10 PC and Rpi3 with librelec). Both non-android devices immediately start re-caching the images to the SMB Thumbnail folder and have no Thumbnails related errors in the log. Both android devices show no images and logs show the same errors in creating the Thumbnails folders in the android directories, and the errors in opening for writing the jpgs themselves in the SMB folder.

Could the problem be that the Samsung and Firestick are not rooted and thus cannot create the Thumbnails folders where they need to be? Although I don't know why it's creating them there in the first place since the whole point of path substitution was to put them on the SMB drive. And also why would this also cause writing to the SMB drive to fail?

[jubilex]

SOLVED

The problem was in the <to> path name:

Code:

<pathsubstitution> 
        <substitute>
             <from>special://masterprofile/Thumbnails/</from>                    
            <to>smb://192.168.1.137/y/Thumbnails/</to> 
        </substitute> 
    </pathsubstitution>

There I used the full path including IP address, shared drive (y), and shared folder name (Thumbnails). I needed to leave out the shared drive letter and just use the direct name of the shared folder:

Code:

<pathsubstitution> 
        <substitute>
             <from>special://masterprofile/Thumbnails/</from>                    
            <to>smb://192.168.1.137/Thumbnails/</to> 
        </substitute> 
    </pathsubstitution>

[crawfish]

There I used the full path including IP address, shared drive (y), and shared folder name (Thumbnails). I needed to leave out the shared drive letter and just use the direct name of the shared folder

Glad you figured it out. No idea why it didn't work if "y" is a share name that you gave to a drive, and it has a folder "Thumbnails" as child. Like I wrote earlier, "Below, my share name is 'Kodi'", and the "To" path was "smb://SERVER_NAME/Kodi/Thumbnails/". In my case, "Kodi" is a folder, but I have a Bluray drive I share as "Blu," and it works fine in the non-Kodi contexts I use it in. So I don't know why it would matter if the share is a drive instead of a folder, as long it has a child folder "Thumbnails".

[jubilex]

There I used the full path including IP address, shared drive (y), and shared folder name (Thumbnails). I needed to leave out the shared drive letter and just use the direct name of the shared folder

Glad you figured it out. No idea why it didn't work if "y" is a share name that you gave to a drive, and it has a folder "Thumbnails" as child. Like I wrote earlier, "Below, my share name is 'Kodi'", and the "To" path was "smb://SERVER_NAME/Kodi/Thumbnails/". In my case, "Kodi" is a folder, but I have a Bluray drive I share as "Blu," and it works fine in the non-Kodi contexts I use it in. So I don't know why it would matter if the share is a drive instead of a folder, as long it has a child folder "Thumbnails".

Yes, and it's made even weirder by the fact that the exact same path substitution, with drive letter, DID work in my non-Android Kodi install.