Permanently switch off fetching covert art etc. from the 'net and use local sources only

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ramjet
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Joined: Fri May 07, 2021 9:07 pm
Great Britain

Permanently switch off fetching covert art etc. from the 'net and use local sources only

Post by ramjet »

Hello,

I've got a myth box which contains media exclusively taken from 4 sources:

1. Music ripped from my CD collection.
2. Video ripped from my DVD collection.
3. Music personally created by myself (with others)
4. Videos personally created by myself (with others)

The problem I've got is that Myth keeps downloading cover art and descriptions from the net for my personal stuff which is obviously totally wrong ! e.g. A series of videos of one of my bands performing several years ago (which was split into individual songs) has been identified as episodes of "Mighty Mouse" so when you select it in Mythfrontend you get a picture of "Mighty Mouse" and, when you select a video, you then get a description of a "Mighty Mouse" episode. At first this was slightly amusing but it's now started to really bug me :(

What I would *really* like to do is be able to permanently switch off Myth going to the internet for cover art and descriptions and instead to always use an image file and a text description file from the same directory that contains the media files. If neither are present then a blank image and no description is fine (infinitely better than something that's randomly wrong !).

I have read the forums, plus various topis on the 'net, but am not clear on how to do this ? or indeed if it's possible ? (If it isn't I'd like to raise this as a feature request).

e.g. If I have a directory "/var/lib/mythtv/videos/2012-04-21 The Delmars, Blackpool" containing a series of video clips I'd like to be able to place the following files:

"/var/lib/mythtv/videos/2012-04-21 The Delmars, Blackpool/Cover.jpg"
"/var/lib/mythtv/videos/2012-04-21 The Delmars, Blackpool/Description.txt"

I would then like Myth to use those files (n.b. the actual file names aren't important so I don't mind what they are - as long as there's a clear standard to follow)

Like I say the current situation, whereby Myth is pulling "random" cover art and descriptions off the internet is slightly amusing. But also very irritating. I'd like to be in control and simply don't want it going off to the internet and making my collection look like a disordered mess of random crap :)

Obviously most people will be happy with the current situation so I'd like this to be an optional global switch which you can set which will be respected by all myth plugins etc.

Cheers.
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pgbennett
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United States of America

Re: Permanently switch off fetching covert art etc. from the 'net and use local sources only

Post by pgbennett »

You can easily switch off the automatic scan for video metadata. Uncheck the entry:
mythfrontend -> Setup -> Media Settings -> Videos Settings -> Metadata Settings -> Perform Metadata Update after Video Scan

The artwork is placed into the Fanart and Coverart directories that you set up in mythtv-setup. If you place your files there you can go into the front end, videos, select the video, Press menu (M) twice -> Change Video Details -> Edit Details. Select "Find local coverart", "Find local banner" , etc. and select your file.
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dnalorernst
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Joined: Mon Feb 17, 2020 8:03 pm
Austria

Re: Permanently switch off fetching covert art etc. from the 'net and use local sources only

Post by dnalorernst »

Search for the usage of 'mxml' files, e.g.:
https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/MythTV_Univ ... ata_Format
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3829
With these files you can define the content / description / covers for an item of the Video Storage Group.
BTW, what MythTV version you are using?
ramjet
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Joined: Fri May 07, 2021 9:07 pm
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Re: Permanently switch off fetching covert art etc. from the 'net and use local sources only

Post by ramjet »

Thanks for the replies and apologies for the delayed response - I've not had time to get to my PC much this week.

pgbennett: Thanks for the tip - I hadn't seen that. But that would mean going to every single video and endless use of the menu which will be really tedious :) I'd like to simply place files in the same directory as the video content which, if you'd set a global setting to ask it to do this, would get picked up by deafult. This is trivial to do as I would simply copy directories over to my Mythbox without any further action required. Using the menu for each thing I want to change means a whole lot of time/effort on my part and is an inefficient interface for what I want to do.

dnalorernst: That's interesting but again it's too much effort compared to just placing files with specific names in the same directory as the video content. Plus XML is a p.i.t.a. It's great if computers are generating/reading it but is really prone to hard to diagnose errors if a human has to edit it. At my work we replaced XML config files for one (small) system with plain old ".ini" files as there was far too much downtime being created by people making errors whilst editing.

All: I'm a lazy human and want the computer to do the work for me, I don't want to have to go and edit every single video using the menus or hand set up XML etc. Mythfront end is desgined to be used with a remote so it takes a lot of button presses to do things. I'd like a simple solution which I have to use very little effort to implement and placing files in the same directory as the content is just about as simple as you can get. Very KISS conformant :)

If I had time I'd write somethign which would trawl my video collection, find any cover art files, then go and update the database. But that would be prone to breakage when you release new versions of the code etc. Having said that I probably will do this but I get so little free time at the moment that it won;t be a foor a good while.

Oh well.. Looks like I'll just have to switch off the automatic scanning, put up with the random iamges that have already been foisted on my stuff, and find some time to go and delete them all.
ramjet
Newcomer
Posts: 7
Joined: Fri May 07, 2021 9:07 pm
Great Britain

Re: Permanently switch off fetching covert art etc. from the 'net and use local sources only

Post by ramjet »

Thanks for the replies and apologies for the delayed response - I've not had time to get to my PC much this week.

pgbennett: Thanks for the tip - I hadn't seen that. But that would mean going to every single video and endless use of the menu which will be really tedious :) I'd like to simply place files in the same directory as the video content which, if you'd set a global setting to ask it to do this, would get picked up by deafult. This is trivial to do as I would simply copy directories over to my Mythbox without any further action required. Using the menu for each thing I want to change means a whole lot of time/effort on my part and is an inefficient interface for what I want to do.

dnalorernst: That's interesting but again it's too much effort compared to just placing files with specific names in the same directory as the video content. Plus XML is a p.i.t.a. It's great if computers are generating/reading it but is really prone to hard to diagnose errors if a human has to edit it. At my work we replaced XML config files for one (small) system with plain old ".ini" files as there was far too much downtime being created by people making errors whilst editing.

All: I'm a lazy human and want the computer to do the work for me, I don't want to have to go and edit every single video using the menus or hand set up XML etc. Mythfront end is desgined to be used with a remote so it takes a lot of button presses to do things. I'd like a simple solution which I have to use very little effort to implement and placing files in the same directory as the content is just about as simple as you can get. Very KISS conformant :)

If I had time I'd write something which would trawl my video collection, find any cover art files, then go and update the database. But that would be prone to breakage when you release new versions of the code etc. Having said that I probably will do this but I get so little free time at the moment that it won't be a for a good while.

n.b. I currently generate "covert art" for my home made videos using the screen shot in VLC ("shift + S"). That's the sort of simplicity I'd like !

Oh well.. Looks like I'll just have to switch off the automatic scanning, put up with the random images that have already been foisted on my stuff, and find some time to go and delete them all.
wmorrison
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Posts: 165
Joined: Sat Dec 01, 2018 12:05 am
United States of America

Re: Permanently switch off fetching covert art etc. from the 'net and use local sources only

Post by wmorrison »

I have a similar question. I do want to retrieve all text metadata, but no images. Are there no settings for this? I've searched everywhere I can think of.

It's not just a matter of not wanting to see the images, I don't want to waste bandwidth downloading them, but I do want the text for description, actors, etc.
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