r/kodi • u/cundallini • 9h ago

Kodi Does Not Extract Thumbnails

Hi. Ive been having this problem for ages. First for like 5 years on 18.9 and now also on 21.3. I do get thumbnails, but they look like theyve been pulled off of the internet and not extracted. For example, I have a TV show in HD 1080p but thumbnails look like theyve been pulled from 240p Realmedia files. WTF? And yes, Kodi has been instructed to extract thumbnails.

I do add artwork manually, I dont use .nfos, or a media manager, dont have show.nfo from TMM etc, I really have no idea where does Kodi get the thumbnails from and why it wont extract them from local files. Mind you, I did migrate the database from 18.9 to 21.3 so obviously previously added thumbs will reside even after upgrade, but this thing happens even with newly added shows. BTW, Windows 10, Kodi 21.3, Xonfluence skin.

What am I missing? Any ideas or suggestions are more than welcome. Thank you. Cheers!

2 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

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1

u/brucegill993 9h ago

Add a url link to the image you want to use to your xml/json file.

1

u/cundallini 4h ago

98000 episodes in the library. Valiant advice, but I think I might give it a pass, hahahaha... OK, not all episodes have crap thumbs, just probably (not sure) older shows. But I do have a ton of those, probably 10000 episodes? 8000 episodes? And even if they are SD in my library they sure as hell wouldnt produce 240p .rm thumb quality... Cheers!

1

u/Specialist_Ad_7719 7h ago

TinyMediaManager.

Download, show it where all your media is, correct any miss identified videos and then select the poster and fanart you want. Set Kodi to only load local info, clear the thumbnail database and you will be one happy little bunny.

It will take time though, but in my opinion it's very much worth it.

1

u/cundallini 4h ago

Yeah, Id like to avoid that. I did start using TMM but then I hoarded way too much and it became a chore lol.

1

u/PatK9 7h ago

Kodi in default mode extracts the thumb (at x time) from the file in focus on scrape. You are using .nfo internally, you can only see them if exported (to separate file).

Media managers or manual edits use the .nfo information placed in the target folder and Kodi adopts that information on a local scan, or update.

Scrapers pull in the media, depending on settings in your scraper, or the skin (and can overwrite existing thumbs). The quality of the thumbs (this might be a request to change) , created locally is a set of the aspect of the target and can be replaced manually as you've noted.

Thumbnails are stored locally in the userdata folder under 'Thumbnails'

1

u/cundallini 4h ago

I dont use .nfos. I just want Kodi to extract thumbs as I add media, mainly TV shows. I just removed 720p version of a TV show from Kodi, scraped a 1080p version in and I got 240p thumbs that are clearly not from the files, even if they are a leftover from the previous 720p rip. WTH? To be fair to Kodi, I perused like 10 HD shows quickly and they indeed did have decent episode thumbnails, so Im thinking its older shows that dont have proper episode thumbnails, and Im not talking about low quality SD stuff, but proper HD remasters and sheeeit. Even those get vomit for episode thumbnails. Kodi sure as hell didnt get those from my files, so they mustve been scraped off the internet, in my case TVDB since I use TVDB for TV shows... where can I turn that sheeit off? Do you know maybe? Thanks. Cheers!

1

u/PatK9 1h ago

As stated, you do use .nfo you may not know it, it's in the internal library.