[lesrhorer]

My KODI systems have been running a while, now, but very few of the actors are associated with a thumbnail.  I haven't been able to discern any pattern to the lack of artwork, but fewer than 1 in 10 actors have artwork associated with  them.  It does not seem to make a difference how young, old, well known, popular, or in how many movies the actor  has starred.  Some very obscure actors have art, and most of the most prolific and best known do not.  I read over the Wiki concerning actor thumbnails, but wasn't able to get much out of it.  Is there a way to induce KODI to search more thoroughly for actors?  Would it help to host all the actors' artwork on one of my servers?  After all, the databases should be identical.  If yes, is there a good external scraper - preferably a Linux application - to collect all the actor artwork?  Certainly my Linux servers are far, far faster than any of the KODI hosts and have vastly greater storage.

[Hitcher]

It's all down to the sites the scraper get the images from ie https://www.themoviedb.org/ and if they don't have them then Kodi can't store them.

[Karellen]

Like @Hitcher said, it depends on what images are available.

I have made a feature request to the scrapers to ignore actors without images. I doubt it will be implemented though... https://github.com/xbmc/metadata.themovi...issues/157

[lesrhorer]

Really?  John Wayne?  Alicia Silverstone?  Alan Rickman?  Alan and Adam Arkin?  Annie Potts?  Anjelica Huston?  Angela Lansbury?  Katherine Hepburn?  Kate Winslet?  Clint Eastwood?  Harrison Ford?  You have to be kidding me.  Every one of those famous actors - and a vary large majority of the tens of thousands of actors in the films I have - all have their pictures on the site listed, but none of them are on my KODI systems. Yet, more than half of those whose pictures the KODI systems do have are people whose names I have never heard:  Austin Falk. Annie Parisse.  Alex Essoe. Ben Woolf.  Each of those has only been on one of the more than 2000 films I have on my server.  There has to be something else other than availability on the web site going on, here.

Besides that, those answers do not really address my main questions.  Can we get something other than the resource-limited KODI boxes to download and store the thumbnails?

[jbinkley60]

Really?  John Wayne?  Alicia Silverstone?  Alan Rickman?  Alan and Adam Arkin?  Annie Potts?  Anjelica Huston?  Angela Lansbury?  Katherine Hepburn?  Kate Winslet?  Clint Eastwood?  Harrison Ford?  You have to be kidding me.  Every one of those famous actors - and a vary large majority of the tens of thousands of actors in the films I have - all have their pictures on the site listed, but none of them are on my KODI systems. Yet, more than half of those whose pictures the KODI systems do have are people whose names I have never heard:  Austin Falk. Annie Parisse.  Alex Essoe. Ben Woolf.  Each of those has only been on one of the more than 2000 films I have on my server.  There has to be something else other than availability on the web site going on, here.

Besides that, those answers do not really address my main questions.  Can we get something other than the resource-limited KODI boxes to download and store the thumbnails?

It would probably be good to see the contents of the actor table in your video database in Kodi.   This is where the artwork file is pointed to by the actor name.  I am not sure what OS your Kodi system is running on and there are a few tools available which can export Kodi database tables as CSV files (some Kodi addons and some stand-alone database visualizer tools).   I author one, Kodi Selective Cleaner, which has an export utility as well as an analyzer / cleaner utility to help with orphaned records.   Others here might have suggestions on CSV export utilities.

I run a bit of a different setup than you where I can download and track actor images.  It would be nice if (maybe there is an addon already) which has similar functionality to help folks maintain their actor images.  This might be something I would consider for a future Kodi addon.  The challenge is that actor images are regularly being added to the scraper sites. Going back and checking for new ones isn't easy without a tool like this.  I have almost 88,000 actor records in my Kodi database.  Just over 18,000 don't have images.

Mezzmo actor comparison completed successfully.

TMDB query count:                                 10
TMDB image queries:                             10
TMDB images found on this query:        0
IMDB query count:                                 10
IMDB image queries:                             10
IMDB images found on this query:        0
IMDB image query success rate:          100.0%

         ************  Mezzmo Artwork Checker Stats  *************

Last time checker ran:                  2023-08-01 07:19:05
Mezzmo actors found:                              80653
Mezzmo actors deleted:                              1094
Mezzmo Poster files found:                        54310
Mezzmo Poster files without actor:            11014
Mezzmo UserPoster files found:                 15484
Mezzmo UserPoster files without actor:             0
Mezzmo actor not found on IMDB/TMDB:    4717
Mezzmo actors with Good Image:             58248
Mezzmo actors with Bad Image:                  417
Mezzmo actors with no Image:                 23395
Mezzmo actors with no Image found:       18254



Thanks,

Jeff

[scott967]

I use TMDB site for actor thumbs mostly (or personally-curated art placed in local .actors subfolder of each movie folder).  If you don't like Kodi scraper addons you might have a look at the "supplementary tools" forum where there are various programs for scraping outside of Kodi (I like Media Companion but there are many others).  Those programs generally create full nfo files which you then use for "scraping" in Kodi.  MC has an option to create an actor image folder, sort of like how music artist works in Kodi.

I don't use TVDB due to what's going on with their api.

Kodi stores the URI path to the actor thumb in the video database and when first needed the image is cached to the local thumbnail folder.

scott s.
.

[lesrhorer]

I am afraid none of this is really helping.  Clearly it is not an issue with the database being used (it could be an API issue, of course).  In addition, I have looked, and I see no way to update / change the database used by KODI.

[Hitcher]

Really?  John Wayne?  Alicia Silverstone?  Alan Rickman?  Alan and Adam Arkin?  Annie Potts?  Anjelica Huston?  Angela Lansbury?  Katherine Hepburn?  Kate Winslet?  Clint Eastwood?  Harrison Ford?

Something is wrong with your setup as I have images for a few of them.

Refresh the info for a movie with one them in and post the debug log.

[lesrhorer]

All three systems are running Android.  One is an Android TV box.  The second is a Sony Bravia TV.  The third is my Motorola smart phone.  I think all three have the same results.  (It's a little hard to tell with more than 20,000 actors in the database.)  The log is from the Sony TV.

Log file after video refresh

[lesrhorer]

Oh, the film I refreshed was El Dorado with John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, James Caan, Arthur Hunnicutt, Edward Asner, Michele Carey, Christopher George, Charlene Holt, Paul Fix, R. G. Armstrong, Johnny Crawford, and Robert Donner.  Not a single oneof them has an actor thumbnail.

[lesrhorer]

I use TMDB site for actor thumbs mostly (or personally-curated art placed in local .actors subfolder of each movie folder).  If you don't like Kodi scraper addons you might have a look at the "supplementary tools" forum where there are various programs for scraping outside of Kodi (I like Media Companion but there are many others).  Those programs generally create full nfo files which you then use for "scraping" in Kodi.  MC has an option to create an actor image folder, sort of like how music artist works in Kodi.

I don't use TVDB due to what's going on with their api.

Kodi stores the URI path to the actor thumb in the video database and when first needed the image is cached to the local thumbnail folder.

scott s.
.

I don't use a separate directory for each movie.  With thousands of movies, that would get to be ridiculously unmanageable, especially since KODI is not the only media client I use.  I have four TiVos, and I also use VLC.  I have two movie network shares.  One is for traditional movies, and it has 27 directories with movies sorted into them alphabetically.  The second share is for movie franchises with a separate directory for each franchise.

Every movie video file has an associated .nfo file, most of which were created either by a TiVo or the Metagenerator application into a .txt file and then scraped by an application I wrote into the .nfo file.  As I already mentioned, it would be perfect if the KODI systems could pull the thumbnail data from a cache on one of my servers, but how do I do this?  How / where in the UI can I point the KODI boxes to my server for their thumbnail cache, or alternately can I embed the .nfo files with the locations of the thumbnails on my server?

[Karellen]

Every movie video file has an associated .nfo file, most of which were created either by a TiVo or the Metagenerator application into a .txt file and then scraped by an application I wrote into the .nfo file. 

And don’t you think this is the problem?

Post your nfo file to Kodi Paste Site and provide the link.

I have advised you previously that you would run into trouble using converted data files from other systems.

[lesrhorer]

I don't know.  That is why I am asking.

Which one do you want?  There are thousands of them.  I will go ahead and post the one for El Dorado.

El Dorado nfo file

Frankly, I fail to see your point.  Either KODI supports .nfo files, or it doesn't.  If it does, then it needs to support them fully.  I fail to see what the .nfo files have to do with it, however, unless they cover the actor thumbnails.  If they do, then someone alluding to the fact would have for the most part answered my questions.

[Karellen]

El Dorado nfo file

Thanks.
So where are the actors images meant to come from?

This is my nfo file... https://paste.kodi.tv/boyafigudi Study it and compare mine to yours.
Now, copy the contents of that paste into your nfo file, and rescan the movie back into the library. What happens?

Your nfo file is severely lacking in data. You have no artwork links so how is Kodi meant to find the artwork for you?
You seem to be determined on reusing these old and lacking data files in Kodi, and it seems to me for no other reason than sentimentality.

Do yourself a favour and let Kodi scrape your movies and shows, or you will end up wasting an enormous amount of time forcing something to work that's not suited to Kodi.
(I'm pretty sure I have said this to you before)

[Fuzzard]

Frankly, I fail to see your point.  Either KODI supports .nfo files, or it doesn't.  If it does, then it needs to support them fully.

Just to comment on this particular part, there is no standard for an nfo file. Kodi implements the contents of an nfo file for our purposes. It's a file extension and that's all. Any other program will treat it in the same manner