I’ve had my live streaming for months and I have never gotten it to show me any media information. I’ve tried to change views, made sure my internet connection was good (hulu+ and netflix work fine), nothing I do can ever pull up media info on movies that I have ripped as avi, mpg, or mp4 onto my external passport. How do I get it to display anything?
I ended up getting another program called TVixie to generate photos with the media info on them, but I’m having difficulty getting these to display. I can’t find anything online about what the filename needs to be to display as a background instead of just cover art thumbnails, but TVixie has a profile specifically to generate the whole media image for wdtv, and it doesn’t even show up in the folder.
Can anyone help me figure out how to set my wdtv up to display what I want?
Edit–
I can see the folder.jpg from outside, but inside the folder for each movie I see no movie info and no pic. I’ve tried using TVixie and Thumbgen and they generate files but the WD doesn’t see any info or images.
Thank you, I have already installed the latest firmware, still no media info shows up, and still the background doesn’t display tvixie images. I will continue to look.
Strange, I have two units and metadata works very well.
First thing to do is: go to Settings → Media Library should be ON! Otherwise metadata will not work.
Also: Add Folders to your Media Library (the folders must be writeable). No need to add your USB-drive (Passport), this will be added automatically. Nevertheless, Settings → Media Library should be ON!
example file name:
Jonah.Hex.2010.mkv
(probably “Jonah Hex.2010.mkv” or “Jonah_Hex.2010.mkv” will also work
Folder structure:
My folder structure is:
Main/Movies/Action/Jonah_Hex/Jonah.Hex.2010.mkv
Main/Movies/War/Kill them All/Kill.Them.All.1942.avi
TVixe will not work, it does not create the correct xml format for the metadata and backdrops to display.
You can use thumbgen, but you have to make sure that you have it set to generate the xml’s correclty. You can see more about how to set up thumbgen here: http://www.mediafire.com/view/?82991053b0fr50b this is for my themes but the setup for generating the xml’s correctly are the same.
For the SMP to display your own backdrops the filename has to be in the meta xml. It will be in the xml like this:
your_filename.jpg
Backdrops and metadata will not display for folders, so if your files are in DVD format (TS/VOB) then you will need to convert to ISO.
For thumbnails, the thumb name has to match your file name:
Thank you for that info, I thought just having the jpeg with the tvixie setup would display it, and none of the files are .iso, i have them saved as mpeg and avi to save a bit of space. I will try to use thumbgen to get it up and running.
As far as the themes, do those impact the background.jpg?
Do you mean the backdrop? If so, then it depends on the theme, some themers have diabled the backdrop and others (like mine) use a moviesheet (still a backdrop, just modified to go with my themes), like this:
Ok, after some time I’ve managed to answer my own questions (along with the answers provided by others here - much appreciated), it would have helped if I had asked them right.
To have WDTV Live Streaming display the movie info, it needs to be in an .xml named the same as the movie file.
To display the movie sheet it needs to be a jpeg and encased in tags in the xml file.
To have WDTV create it’s own xml files it needs to have the media in a writeable folder and have media library enabled.
Now on to the themes.
After all the researching I found that I can download themes directly to my WDTV Live Streaming from the internet, but only a couple are available. Of those, the only one I liked was the Mod one and with the synopsis it wouldn’t display it properly (text kept scrolling too fast to read - not enough space in the synopsis box).
Also, after applying the mod theme and going back to the default, there are no more options on how to display slideshow images. Random is the only option. How do I fix this? (Loaded the other theme again, pressing down on remote showed the other options, after selecting default theme it was fixed)
How do I download Mojo or Darklight to my Live Streaming?
I want to have a moviesheet theme that is clean and fast like the mod theme instead of slow like the default. I downloaded your thumbgen and have used it to generate the xml as well as the wd_tv.jpg files but it puts text in the backdrop and when it is in both the backdrop and the xml it clutters the screen.
Right now it looks like the only solution is to have only a backdrop image with no synopsis (not tvixie or thumbgen’s bailywick) in the xml file.
