Serviio

I have recently installed Serviio on my server, and wish to use it as a movie server for my several WDTV HD Live boxes. I have a few 2TB+ USB drives full of movies (my ripped dvd collection) that I wish to be able to access. I plugged one drive in and loaded it into Serviio library.

The drive contains about 350 movies, each with a DVD cover jpg all in the same folder (movie-1.mkv, movie-1.jpg, movie-2.mkv, movie-2.jpg, etc.). Serviio is set to "Look for local DVD cover image or poster" only ("generate thumbnails" and "retrieve DVD cover if available" are both disabled.

My issue is that my WDTV boxes can browse the folder, but only the first 98-100 movies are thumbnailed with their correct posters. All the rest have been assigned the folder.jpg icon (used by WDTV as the folder icon). I have removed and re-added the drive to the library, uninstalled and reinstalled Serviio, waitied several hours for the library to maybe finish updating the thumbnails, but nothing seems to help. It always stops recognizing the thumbnails at the same movie and goes no further even though the format is identical on all files. This is the same on the subfolder, which has about 15 movies, but only the first 4 recognize their thumbnails, and the rest again get assigned the folder.jpg image.

Any thoughts on how to get this to properly recognize all the movie.jpg images? I have to plans to let Serviio download the metadata, i only wish it to recognize the pictures i have already downloaded.

Thanks very much for you help. This software looks very useful and I will purchase the Pro version (for wireless streaming to ipad) if I can get it to work with my thumbnails, which I consider important for the look and feel of my setup.

Did you try to look at MediaBrowser to see if the thumbnails are correct there?

Hi Petr, thanks for responding.

I am not in front of it at the moment, but I am currently using the free version. I only installed it two days ago though, so I should still be in the 15 day Pro trial phase. Is the MediaBrowser available by default in that version? If so, I will try it tomorrow night when I get home and post the results.

Thanks again for your help. I really hope I get it to recognize the thumbs, as my colleagues all use it and I intend it to be an integral part of my new home's media environment.

MediaBrowser exhibits the same behavior. Only the first 8 pages (first 96 movies) have the correct dvd cover, the rest all have the same jpg (the "folder.jpg" used by WDTV).

Any thoughts on how to get it to recognize the other cover jpgs?

OK, so I figured it out.

The folder contained about 350 movies, each with a video file (movie1.mkv) and cover picture (movie1.jpg). There was also a file in the folder called "folder.jpg", which the WDTV box uses to ascribe a picture to the movie folder itself.

All the movies BEFORE "folder.jpg" (alphabetically) had the correct cover art, and every one after used the "folder.jpg" file as its cover, ignoring the file named the same as itself. This is bizarre behavior. I removed the folder.jpg file, and rebooted the entire server machine, but when it came back it was still the same. I could not find where the cover art cache was stored (I looked in the Program folder, but the cache files were all 0 bytes), so eventually I had to reinstall Serviio and re-add the drive to the library. Once it came back up...voila!

I guess the work around it to ensure you don't have any extra picture files in your video folder.

Petr, does this mean you simply cannot store extra images in the same folder as video+cover files?

The way it works is - if movie.jpg is present it is used, otherwise it checks for folder.jpg (which is assigned to all files in the folder without moviename.jpg). You spotted a bug though, which I have now fixed (with the folder.jpg being applied even if files have moviename.jpg in some cases)

Related to this, I'm seeing something funky happening when the folder structure is more than 1 deep. For example:

Movies
|
|---Comedy
| |---1.avi
| |---2.avi
| |---3.avi
|
|---Documentary
|---Horror
|
|---a.avi
|---b.avi
|---c.avi

If a thumbnail for 'b.avi' cannot be found then the 'b.avi' thumb is the Serviio default.
However, if a thumbnail for '\comedy\1.avi' cannot be found then it looks like the 'folder.jpg' thumb is used.
I am using online sources for metadata and do not have any 'jpgs' stored within the folder structure. What it looks like to me is that the metadata search is pulling folder.jpg for 'comedy', 'documentary', 'horror', etc. If this is by design then the folder.jpg that is extracted does not make sense and I would prefer the Serviio default thumb for files that were not found in online sources.

thanks
-chris

The priority is:

1) Local jpg (folder.jpg, movie.jpg, etc)
2) Online metadata thumbnail
3) a frame extracted from the file

Thats the thing though. I dont have any local jpgs, only online meta. So is the folder name 'comedy' also included in meta search? I mean the actual folder name of ' comedy'.

It uses both, file name and folder name, in the online metadata search. File names have got priority. If, however, either file or folder name matches exactly one of the found titles, it's deemed as 100% match and used.

So if there is a title in the online DB called Comedy, then it'd be used, if your file name is not the exact match of the title you actually want.

That would explain it.Thanks.