Hi, sorry to post that as a separate thread, hopefully it can be resolved quickly. I've read here and there that most of you do some kind of reset after upgrading the firmware. I've never done that to date, and it has always worked well. But it's been a while now that some posters randomly do not load, as if the folder picture was not found (even if the movie is recognized). And it stays that way until I bring the menu to do a "Change picture", and load the first one which is the one found in the media folder (the folder picture still does not load if I do a rematch). I think maybe this might be solved by a reset, my questions: How do you reset after firmware update? I have a number of categories that I've created, will I loose all this if I reset? And will I loose for ex the read status? Many thanks in advance!
I know a lot of users restart their boxes after a firmware upgrade but I don't know that anyone resets their box. I never bother doing either unless I'm specifically testing something requiring a full reset and the way I handle it is to have all my artwork and NFOs exported locally so when I rescan from scratch I use local assets and my HT interface comes back as it was. Reset options can be found in Settings/Other/Recovery and Reset but a factory reset is just that - you loose absolutely everything - main settings, HT settings, the works. So if you want to do that make sure you make a backup of HT first from HT4/Settings/Library and obviously don't back it up to the box!!! Just note that the backup is just a backup of the SQL database and associated settings, it doesn't backup the actual artwork so this gets downloaded again from the internet after a restore - The table entries include the URLs of the artwork but sometimes in their infinite wisdom TMDB move stuff around so those URLs have a propensity to change - shouldn't be a problem, but it's just something to be aware of. Also make a note of settings such as resolution, audio settings, wallpaper etc since all that goes back to factory too.
Ok thank you very much! I'll try to backup, reset and restore to see if it solves my image loading problem. Just a followup: under HT4/Settings/Library, there is a "Backup & Reset" where you find the backup option (I backed up to a USB thumb drive), there is also an "export NFO", which does not tell where it exports the NFO. This process is very long, I'm assuming it exports a whole lot of things, but to where? Is that useful as well? I also noticed there is a "Clear data" button, not clear what this does either.
I always wondered why Media Players never come with a backup/restore App for settings and add-ons. I understand this from Google as it promotes their own cloud based services and backup.to be used but not from companies like Zidoo. Something functionally equivalent to Samsung Smart Switch PC would be adequate.
I've suggested it several times and they said they were going to look at it, but it seems to have been forgotten. Just save settings into an XML file would do the trick.
Export NFO allows you to export an NFO file and local artwork (poster and fanart) to the actual movie locations - I use this all the time: If you have a look in one of your movies folders you'll see what I mean.
Not exactly. The API uses the URL of the original poster. No matter if the poster is moved in another language in TMDb, the database will still have access to the poster selected in HT because the URL remains the same. It even still has access to the poster for a couple of months if the poster has been deleted from TMDb (this is what happened when they decided to delete all the posters older than 2 years at the beginning of the pandemic, giving me time enough to re-upload over 6000 french posters as I knew a trick to get them from the background of the website). But yes, the safest way to save all the images used remains to save them in local.
Ok thank you Mark - actually my movie folders already include artwork and NFO (only created by another app, Emby). But it seems that it actually saves into the folder specified in the Poster Folder setting, and I configured a local folder. I tried to Clear Data in HT4, then restore it from backup, and I tried to factory reset, put back my settings in the main settings interface, and then restore from backup in HT4, and no luck, some movies randomly show no posters. I will try recreating all my collections from scratch to see if there's better luck.
Maybe something has changed but this is the reason I stopped using backups and switched to local assets - I found that if I used a backup that was maybe a few months old, some posters would not appear when I restored the backup. I then opened the backup database in SQLite and found that for those posters that were not found, the database URL entry was 404. An example in an old backup of mine is: http://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/jcvJ2xcVWU9Wh0hZAxcs103s8nN.jpg Which was the poster for Apocalypse Now and is 404 After a later scrape, the poster path is correct: http://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/gQB8Y5RCMkv2zwzFHbUJX3kAhvA.jpg
Another problem with backups is that if you use local art and restore from a backup, it uses online art so all your posters are screwed. So if I've messed up the database (which I do very regularly!) I just reset HT4 and rescrape using my local resources so it all comes back as before. The only problem there is you lose any "viewed" data but that doesn't bother me because I don't use the library like that.
Probably what I was talking about with their big cleanup. A lot of posters were gone and the contributors had to upload them again. They used a bot to do that and it took a couple of months to go all over their database of thousands and thousand of posters. Then, the deleted posters were still reachable by the API for few months before to be completed erased and you get the issue you had. Many posters in high quality are gone in the english part and now replaced by lower quality ones. TMDb was a gold mine for the textless posters but not sure we will see this again…
Unfortunately, in my case, the problem I had (some posters not showing, no matter how the setting "Load local image first" is set) is still present after restoring my backup. It may be linked to your comment above (URLs that are not valid anymore - which is weird because I have local artwork). I had to restore to factory and start from scratch. Now everything loads correctly on my movies folders. Right now, my remaining problem is for my Series folder, where I have more than 5000 episodes, the device scan hangs and crashes a lot, haven't managed to run a complete scan yet. I'll wait for the next firmware update (6.3.45 I believe), when available on my Z1000pro, to see if this is fixed (I have seen that a "Fixed the occasional crash problem when scanning" is in the change log).
