album art for album folders

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crusty
Posts:1
Joined:Thu Jan 24, 2008 12:30 pm
album art for album folders

Post by crusty » Thu Jan 24, 2008 12:44 pm

Hello!

Since I installed the twonky Server, Album Art for the mp3 files itself works fine. But it would be great to see the covers even for the album folders in the overview on my PS3. Is there any possibility to get it work?

D-Kalck
Posts:13
Joined:Tue Dec 18, 2007 9:26 am

Post by D-Kalck » Fri Jan 25, 2008 1:18 pm

Just put a Folder.jpg image file in the folder.

MikeIsotech
Posts:21
Joined:Thu Jan 03, 2008 8:44 pm

Post by MikeIsotech » Sat Jan 26, 2008 12:56 am

I have a folder.jpg file in each of my music folders, along with the track mp3's. Should I see a thumnail of the album art when I look at the album level, before going into the individual album? If I go into each individual album I see the album art against each track, but I don't see it one level up. Is that correct?

Mike

damianb
Posts:1
Joined:Sat Jan 26, 2008 1:52 am

Post by damianb » Sat Jan 26, 2008 2:23 am

Mike, I think that's right. I get the same view. But I would like to see the Album art at the folder level so I know what Album I'm looking at before I see the individual tracks.

Does anyone know if this is supported?

furfoot
Posts:8
Joined:Wed Jan 09, 2008 10:15 am

Post by furfoot » Mon Jan 28, 2008 9:36 am

It works great now for individual movie files. For the folder view the covers aren't displayed but that not such a big deal considering I only stream HD material which is one file per movie anyway.

BuffaloBerny
Posts:2
Joined:Mon Jan 28, 2008 7:56 pm

Post by BuffaloBerny » Mon Jan 28, 2008 9:45 pm

Hi,

how do you make Cover-Art for individual Moviefiles work on PS3?

My Movies are stored like this
X:/VIDEO/abc.avi
X:/VIDEO/xyz.mp4
....

I have no Idea :oops:

Thanks, for any tipps / answers

TwinMoonsAnime
Posts:19
Joined:Sat Feb 09, 2008 12:30 pm

Post by TwinMoonsAnime » Sat Feb 09, 2008 12:34 pm

Hi folks,

My first post here. I am also wondering how to get movie cover art on the PS3. I have all my video files in the same folder. Is it possible to show thumbnail images for them? Thanks.

TwinMoonsAnime
Posts:19
Joined:Sat Feb 09, 2008 12:30 pm

Post by TwinMoonsAnime » Wed Feb 13, 2008 10:34 am

Is there no solution to this?

furfoot
Posts:8
Joined:Wed Jan 09, 2008 10:15 am

Post by furfoot » Thu Feb 14, 2008 8:47 am

TwinMoonsAnime wrote:Hi folks,

My first post here. I am also wondering how to get movie cover art on the PS3. I have all my video files in the same folder. Is it possible to show thumbnail images for them? Thanks.
I think the only way is to store them in seperate folders.

TwinMoonsAnime
Posts:19
Joined:Sat Feb 09, 2008 12:30 pm

Post by TwinMoonsAnime » Thu Feb 14, 2008 8:55 am

Wow, that's a bit of overkill with folders. I've got something like 25-30 videos in one directory. It would be nice if you could use a .jpg file with the same filename as the video and it would use it as the thumbnail for the video, like:

video1.avi
video1.jpg
video2.avi
video2.jpg

etc...

Any way that that would be possible?

Also, I have noticed that even if you have separate folders, the icon for the folder itself cannot be set. Any way to do that? I've checked some of the other posts and a few other people have asked that as well.

grumqyguy
Posts:8
Joined:Tue Jan 29, 2008 7:13 pm
AV Hardware:PS3, Maxtor MSS2 1TB

Post by grumqyguy » Thu Feb 14, 2008 9:39 am

Not sure, but I would say this is a ps3 issue, as if you download the theme creator program, it has icons for all of the with a soecific name for the folder icon. I guess sony just need to add something into the code for this.

What would be good, is if we could get 15 sec moving thumbnails on the video, with the artwork as the folder image

TwinMoonsAnime
Posts:19
Joined:Sat Feb 09, 2008 12:30 pm

Post by TwinMoonsAnime » Thu Feb 14, 2008 9:43 am

Yeah, the 15 sec video clip would rock! But I believe that's a definite PS3 issue because the option for that is grayed out when you are watching videos from a media server.

Eddy5
Posts:6
Joined:Thu Nov 15, 2007 7:02 pm

Re: album art for album folders

Post by Eddy5 » Tue Mar 18, 2008 8:45 pm

Getting back to the original topic of album art for album folders; this isn't working for me on Townky 4.4.4 on a Linksys NSLU2 and my PS3 with 2.17 firmware.
I have updated my MP3s with embedded cover art so I can see the cover on each song file, but the folder icon is the default icon.
Is the problem with the PS3 or Twonky?

immexx
Posts:1
Joined:Wed Nov 12, 2008 11:57 pm
AV Hardware:PS3, Archos 605,PC

Re: album art for album folders

Post by immexx » Thu Nov 13, 2008 1:11 am

I have the same album art problem with the Linkstation 1 (openlink) and PS3 with the actual Firmware 2.52 and older. The ps3 can visualize cover art on directory level for local content but not for the remote twonky media server content (4.4.6)
Any ideas?

I don't know what people expect but I think there must be something to remind me of flipping through a CD collection on the shelf. For that, cover art on directory level is highly recommended.
Another shortcoming are the arrangement possibilities, especially for the album view. Even without cover art I expect all albums groupable by artists. Did you ever arrange your CD collection in other ways? Sure, I can navigate by artist and then album. But thats not the same. If I would like to see all albums on the same hierarchy, it should be possible to group them by artist and not only to sort by album name. The IPod cover flow does exactly that - and in my opinion it is what it makes so effective and nice for 'poking'.

Don't get me wrong, I think twonky is a nice and well working software (especially on tiny NAS systems), but Twonky-Team, please reconsider the cover art and arrangement possibilities...

TwinMoonsAnime
Posts:19
Joined:Sat Feb 09, 2008 12:30 pm

Re: album art for album folders

Post by TwinMoonsAnime » Thu Jan 01, 2009 8:47 am

I recently installed the PlayOn media server on my PC running along with TwonkyServer. PlayOn lets you stream Netflix movies to your PS3. One thing I have noticed about PlayOn is that it shows a thumbnail of each dvd cover when you are browsing the folders. Why is it that I still can't do this with Twonky and that it requires me to have each video in a sperate folder with a separate folder.jpg file? How hard would it be to have Twonky get the thumbnail from a JPG file with the same name as the video file? I love Twonky and this is the only feature that I really want badly.

madattack
Posts:1
Joined:Wed Jan 07, 2009 12:02 am
AV Hardware:PS3, 2GB RAM, WinXP SP3, Twonkyserver 5.0,

Re: album art for album folders

Post by madattack » Wed Jan 07, 2009 12:16 am

I just installed Twonky Media Server 5.0 on my WinXP-Laptop. Unfortunately no album art is shown on my PS3 neither the <Folder.jpg> nor the embedded album art in the MP3-file. If I brose the media with mozilla I can see at least the <Folder.jpg> album art. Did anybody have the same problem and knows how to fix it?

david.wessel
Posts:2
Joined:Sat Dec 22, 2007 3:55 pm

Re: album art for album folders

Post by david.wessel » Tue Jan 13, 2009 11:38 am

I had exactly the same problem: No album art since version 5.
My client is a PS3 (latest firmware), the server is twonky 5.0.40 on ubuntu 8.10/AMD64 (ia32libs installed), no extra plugins, just the standard installation with modifications to /etc/rc.d[x] to have it run at boot. Audiofiles are properly tagged mp3, some with embedded artwork, but most of the directories contain a Folder.jpg. Everything is streamed to the client using a stable (in terms of signal quality) WEP encrypted 54g wifi connection.
Here's the deal: Neither Folder.jpg nor integrated album art shows up. So here is what I did: I wrote a support request to twonky and waited for an answer, after two weeks of no action I asked them to give me back the money that I wasted on the upgrade (still waiting on a reply to this). Meanwhile I am back with 4.4.9 and the covers work again. Covers for movie files do not work, that would be really nice. I remember using them in the xbox media center where all I had to do is put a jpg-file with the same prefix into the folder of the movie file. I find it hard to believe that something that worked 5 years (!) back does not work today.

Anyway, here are a couple of things to check that may be helpful:
  • Just putting a Folder.jpg into all the folders doesn't always work. Some album art is cached and under some circumstances (that I wasn't able to reproduce yet) twonky will not update the contents. My assumption is, that once there is a thumbnail in the cache (be it readable or not, will explain later) it will not be updated.
  • Some album art may be corrupt and unreadable, but it seems as if twonky copies it into its cache anyways (looks like they check the file header only when processing the file but I am not sure about this)
  • Be careful when exporting album art using the CopyCover Plugin with Amarok. I know that both the offline-version (copycover-offline.py) and the script offer you to specify the filename. But since Amarok internally stores the album art in png format and there is no conversion of the file format, specifying an extension other than .png will still yield png files. Of course this cannot be seen when looking at the folder in nautilus. Only when actually opening a "fake" jpg file it tells you that the header is wrong. So: If you export your album art using the copycover script, you need to do a conversion of all the files (i did it by modifying the script to do an image conversion from png to jpg)
  • In case you think that all Folder.jpg are correct, but they still do not show up, try to flush the cache (I just deleted the contents of the twonkyserver.db but be careful, I don't take responsibility if you mess up anythng) and let it rebuild the whole thing by itself (I also hit the "rebuild database" button in the webinterfaces troubleshooting section)
Finally I have to say that this is very frustrating. I know it has been said over and over again but it's still true. I would love to help the developers improve the product and I do not even care if they would do stuff that is not DLNA compliant (heck, implement a switch that enables extra fancy stuff with a big NOT-DLNA sign above it, I don't give a !"§$), I don't even mind installing the latest alpha binaries and sending loads of debug output to some server, just to make it a better product... but how is it going to work if there is little to none communication. And obviously there is none because some fundamental issues aren't solved (or their beta-testers are strange people). Are they arrogant because they sold their product so often? I have no idea. But I do know that pissing off paying customers will act like a boomerang.

Have a nice day, David

TwinMoonsAnime
Posts:19
Joined:Sat Feb 09, 2008 12:30 pm

Re: album art for album folders

Post by TwinMoonsAnime » Tue Jan 13, 2009 7:03 pm

You know, I don't know why I "Upgraded" to 5.0.4 either when my 4.x version was working perfectly fine. I don't see any improvements and stuff that was working before isn't now, like the MP3 images. The only thing new I see is the web streams, most of which don't work. I tried the Youtube streams and I get corrupt data errors on almost all of them. Same for the internet radio stations. I haven't been able to listen to any of them from my PS3. The only thing new that I see are the playlists that I could really do without anyway. Also, for web based media, I like PlayOn's media server much better anyway. I think Twonky should stick with what it's good at-serving local media from a local server. I know there were so many feature requests just in that area that still have not been addressed, especially the issue of thumbnail images for videos.
Also, I think the integration of MediaManager with the server is quite poor. You would think that when you use the star rating feature and the genre features of MediaManager to add meta-data to content, it would use that content for the server. I would except a new menu tree for each like "Videos -> By Star Rating" and "Vidoes -> By Genre", but no such thing exists. Also, they have REMOVED the ability to create custom trees. Even some of the other server settings like the cache settings is gone. It just feels like the server has been dumbed-down. At this point I'm quite disappointed with 5.0.4 because I really see no improvement.

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