Overview

This section describes all the settings you can use to improve and manage your thumbnail images (thumbs) in MediaPortal.

Thumbnails

For an overview of the various graphics and thumbs in MediaPortal, and the location of the various files, see Reference > Graphics

You may also select and change these settings within MediaPortal, see Thumbnail Settings.

Quality Settings

  Tip
Many Skins now  use larger images, and HD resolutions.  You may wish to increase your thumbnail resolution to the highest quality to get best results with these skins.

Default: 4 (120 + 500)
Select the quality of thumbnails that are generated by MediaPortal. The parameters to the right: Resolution, Compositing, Interpolation and Smoothing give some general information about the quality of the thumbnails created. The recommendation on the left gives a general idea what the setting can be used for: LCD televisions ("flat screens") generally need higher quality thumbnails than CRT (classic) televisions because they generally produce a sharper image. 

Note: When you change the Quality settings you must clear the cache or delete the thumbs to re-create them. 

Music thumbs

Usually the image shown when listening to a music album is shown using a

folder.jpg

file. This image is put in the folder of the music album. The size of this image can be very large and can slow MediaPortal down a lot when browsing through your music collection.

Create folder cache on demand

If this option is selected, MediaPortal will create small thumbnails of every cover art (

folder.jpg

or images embedded in ID3 tags, depending on your settings in Music > Database). This is done while you are browsing through your music collection (On Demand). This option will speed-up browsing through your music collection a lot because the files that are created are very small.

Delete all music thumbs

You can delete all music thumbs by clicking this button.

Picture thumbs

Auto-create only small thumbs

When browsing through your pictures, you can see small preview images. If this option is enabled, MediaPortal creates small images of your pictures to speed up browsing. This option will speed-up browsing through your picture collection a lot, because the files that are created are very small.

Clear picture cache

You can delete all picture thumbs by clicking this button.

Videos thumbs

  Tip Thumbnails for TV recordings are configured in TV-Server Configuration > Recording > Thumbs.

Autocreate thumbs

When browsing through your video files, you can see small preview images. If this option is enabled, MediaPortal creates small images of your videos to speed up browsing. Because the files that are created are very small this option will speed-up browsing.

Leave a thumb in recording/video folder

Select this option to save the thumb (

.jpg

) to the folders you chose in Configuration>Videos>Video Folders.
You can edit your Video folders to disable creating thumbs per share or folder. The files will be named after the video file, i.e.

Lie To Me.jpg

.

Note: If you chose this option, thumbs will not be deleted when you Clear Videos thumbs. You must remove the existing ones manually, then new thumbs will regenerate based on the settings you select here.

Clear Videos thumbs

You can delete all video thumbs by clicking this button - required if you change the preview appearance.

Clear Blacklisted Thumbs

When MediaPortal's video thumb creator fails to create a thumb image for a certain video (e.g. the file could be corrupted, or the codec is not supported by the thumbnail generator), it is blacklisted. Its file name is stored in the video database which will prevent further attempts to create a thumb for that particular video file.

You may click Clear Blacklisted thumbs to reset the blacklisted files list. The next time a video or recorded TV folder is opened in MediaPortal, a new video thumb will be generated for video files with missing thumbs. The video file will be added to the blacklist if the thumb creation fails once again. 

Note: When you install a new version of MediaPortal, the blacklist will be cleared and a new attempt to generate thumbnails for videos that are missing one will be made.

Preview Appearance

• Number of columns - Default = 1
• Number of rows - Default = 1

The preview image (thumb) may consist of multiple subsequent screenshots taken from the video. These are then arranged in tiles with the given number of rows and columns. The time between the thumbs will be calculated automatically from the video duration.

1 column and 1 row will create a single thumbnail:

2 columns and 2 rows will create a grid of four thumbnails:

Note: Changed quality settings only have an effect on newly generated thumbs. You must clear the existing thumbs to re-create them with the new quality settings.

Time offset in minutes

  Tip For a recording (in RecordedTV) you will find this option in the TV-Server Configuration > Recording > Thumbs

Use this option to change the time offset in minutes. If you set it to 2 minutes for example, the first thumb will be generated after two minutes playtime of the recording. Should the video duration be less than the time offset, the time offset is automatically shorter.

Changelog