[shorty23]

Hey all,

Tried searching around without much luck and hoping it's just something that I may have missed. I'm going a bit of an obscure route with my media library and am mainly going to be importing ISO rips of my physical media collection.

yes yes, before it's suggested, I know I can just rip these out with MakeMKV into individual video files but I want to preserve the DVD menus as an option for special features and the additional benefits that come with that... plus, the effort involved in doing that ripping becomes infinitely more tedious.

I've settles on using Emby in order to create .nfo files for me by labelling DVDs for a season as s01e01e02e03e04.iso etc. and this handles the creation of these really well and I then just map the SMB share due to Emby not supporting ISO playback, but what I've not been able to figure out is if there is a way to make Kodi force thumbnail generation on import?

I was hoping that without artwork for each episode, Kodi would just get these from TVDB (tried flicking back and forth between local and TVDB as the info source), but I just get blank thumbnails.

I've tried creating s01e01-thumb.jpg and this doesn't behave but s01e01e02e03e04-thumb.jpg does, but then I end up with just the one image for these 4 episodes. I can make that work with the individual DVD cover but that's not really ideal.

Am I missing something or is there no way to achieve what I'm after?

The second thing I was hoping to find a solution to is chapters across multiple devices. On a single device, I can use the bookmark method to create episode pointers in a DVD but As I'm using ISOs, I can't really feed these back via Emby or anything. Is there a way to store these as metadata in the folder so that other devices that connect to the SMB share have this information or is that not possible?

Thanks a heap in advance and sorry for my convoluted use case

[Karellen]

Am I missing something or is there no way to achieve what I'm after?

No, not missing anyway. That is the way it works.
I haven't used multi-episodes for many years, but IIRC, you can change the episode image using the Choose Art option for each episode.
Yes, I know that is time-consuming, but the only way I know of. Probably as time-consuming as ripping to individual episodes

As for saving episode bookmarks, not possible.

[CrystalP]

Episode bookmarks are stored in Kodi's db, so a shared mysql/mariadb db would let multiple devices see them.

[shorty23]

Thanks so much for the quick responses team!!

I'm running all this off a NAS so the shared mariadb instance being served there might be a nice way to achieve this, appreciate that thought and I'll dig into virtualizing that soon

As for thumbnails, that's a bit of a shame but I suppose I can fall back to the DVD/Blu-Ray covers for this. Not quite as nice but it's definitely better than nothing.

I know I SHOULD just rip the video files but especially with anime, it just seems like a huge shame to get rid of the menus with little gags and small special features that aren't quite so simple to scrape info for.