Cinema artwork thumbnails
The cinema_artwork_thumbnails job finds the artwork for your movies, shows, seasons and episodes, and renders it into the sizes Cardinal Cinema displays.
Three kinds of artwork are handled:
| Kind | Shape | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| Poster | Portrait | Movie, show and season tiles |
| Backdrop | Landscape | The large image behind a movie or show |
| Still | Landscape | A single episode |
Sources
The job looks in three places, in this order, and stops at the first one that produces an image.
1. The file system
Images sitting next to your video files are the first choice, and the easiest to control: to change a poster, replace a file.
| Owner | Looks for |
|---|---|
| Movie | poster.* and backdrop.* in the movie's folder |
| Show | poster.* and backdrop.* in the show's folder |
| Season | poster.* in the season folder |
| Episode | <episode file name>.jpg or <episode file name>-thumb.* beside the episode |
Two older naming conventions are accepted as well, so libraries organized by other software work without being renamed:
| File | Treated as |
|---|---|
folder.*, cover.* | Poster |
fanart.* | Backdrop |
Folder artwork is only taken when the folder holds exactly one movie. A folder holding two movies is a grouping folder, and its poster.jpg belongs to neither of them.
2. Embedded in the video file
When the folder has nothing, the job reads the cover art stored inside the video file itself: the cover atom in an mp4, m4v or mov, or an attached image in an mkv. Where a Matroska file carries both of the conventional attachments, the portrait cover.jpg is preferred over the landscape cover_land.jpg for a poster. Only movies and episodes have a video file to read; a show or a season never borrows an episode's cover, so their artwork comes from the folder or not at all.
3. Nothing
An item with no artwork anywhere is finished and recorded as completed, not as an error. It simply displays without a poster. Generating one from a frame of the video needs FFmpeg, and arrives in the next release.
Prioritization
As with album art, the file system beats what is embedded in the media file. This makes replacing a poster a matter of dropping a file into a folder rather than re-tagging a 40 GB video.
File types
Supported image file types are .jpg, .jpeg, .png and .webp.
Rendered sizes
Every image is rendered at two heights, with its aspect ratio preserved and nothing cropped.
| Kind | Small | Large |
|---|---|---|
| Poster | 240 px tall | 600 px tall |
| Backdrop | 270 px tall | 720 px tall |
| Still | 270 px tall | 720 px tall |
Rendered images go into the same thumbnail cache your photo and album art thumbnails use. No extra directory is created, and nothing is written next to your video files — your media folders are never modified.
When it runs
The job starts on its own at the end of any indexing run that indexed movies or TV. It can also be started by hand from the Jobs page of your Media Server's Admin Dashboard.
Each run only looks at items that are still missing artwork, so repeat runs are cheap. An item proven to have no artwork is skipped for the rest of that run, and checked again on the next one — which is what makes adding a poster.jpg later work: drop the file in, run the job, and the poster appears. Re-indexing is not required.
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