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16 December 2009

WDTV ThumbGen 0.7 released!

Version 0.7
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Link: Obsolete.
Release Notes:
  • Extended initial folder selection - multiple folders can be selected via checkboxes (beta)
  • Added Amazon.de and Amazon.fr as collectors
  • Several bugs fixed (related to search keywords and autoupdate mechanism)
  • Minor improvements

 This is the last update for this year, I wish you Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Important: ThumbGen requires a PC with Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/2008/7 and Microsoft .NET Framework v3.5SP1 installed (can be downloaded for free here).

Disclaimer: THE PROGRAM IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

25 comments:

  1. I have a really fast internet connection, yet the program takes forever to display the sample thumbnail once I select the one I want. Any reason why and can it be fixed?

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  2. youpie again a new version:)
    ps: you are right abou thte folder.jpg is not neeeded if yo uhave the movie.jpg it will display fine.

    thanks!

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  3. "I have a really fast internet connection, yet the program takes forever to display the sample thumbnail once I select the one I want. Any reason why and can it be fixed?"

    Hm... what does it mean "forever"? 1-3 seconds can be a reasonable delay. There are several factors influencing the speed of loading image:

    1. internet connection
    2. some slow loading code in ThumbGen
    3. the collector website speed
    4. the image size (I download and cache it fully)

    I can eventually investigate point 2.

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  4. Very good program but it halts if one movie is not found. It doesn't continue to the next movie. Tried it with "The Taking Of Pelham 1 2 3.avi" and it just give a report of image can not generate.

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  5. Is there a way to access the movies on the WDTV attached drives???

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  6. You can always press "Skip movie" to jump over a movie that you do not want (or can't) process. If some image cannot be downloaded from some reason, you can either choose another one or skip the movie.

    WDTV Live has the LAN connector and the connected drives can be mapped and seen as "normal" drives on the PC. For the WDTV without LAN, I don't think there is a way... other that connecting the drive(s) to the PC, generate thumbs then reconnect them to WD.

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  7. Interesting application.

    But you have overlooked the very basic functionality of the application: You do _not_ want to change _aspect ratio_ of images when resizing them!

    You need to have customizable size as _max_ for each side, and then resize to have largest side fit value.

    Otherwise this is unusable for us who want just a bit of quality :o)

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  8. Regarding the aspect ratio, it is obvious that being forced to have a 2:3 aspect ratio by WDTV I'm forced to make some compromise: either stretching the image to fit 200x300 (for example) so 2:3 or doing what u suggested. Your idea is interesting, but u can end up with some images "shorter" or "thicker" than others.

    Example: source image is 500x600. What do I do? I know min value is the width (200), so horizontally my ratio is 2.5 then I divide 600 by 2.5 and I get 240. That means my thumb will be 200x240 having the correct aspect ratio but being 60 pixels shorter... is this the quality u demand? If yes, I can offer that as option, that is no problem for me :)

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  9. Any chance of adding music or mp3 support?

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  10. I have some folders with mkv Files of the movies in it. When i mark a folder or a mkv files i get the message: nothing selected, nothing to do. What goes wrong? Cheers!

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  11. ok, when using Old School mode its working :) Very useful and fine app, thanks for it!

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  12. HiHo Merry Christmas,

    I really love your program, but one thing i miss - Can u build in a list of skip words?? My movie collection is organized name.of.the.movie.german.AC3.avi . Your program filters the name very well and i get

    name of the movie german. Now have to remove german manually and the search finds the targets very well. Is there any possibilty for such a "blacklist" for words ?
    Thanks Killphil

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  13. Very nice app guy!!! Thanks for this! Hope you'll continue to improve it! Merry Christmas.

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  14. HiHo :)

    "Any chance of adding music or mp3 support?"

    I'll take a look soon at the music thumbnail support and at least using amazon will be possible to select covers.

    "Can u build in a list of skip words??"

    Yes, would be no problem to allow the user to define own "black list". Will be implemented for sure in the next version. I didn't want to hardcode skipping words like "german" or "french", but a user-defined black-list can be useful.

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  15. Very nice app!!

    Please, implement spanish poster search.
    this is a good site: www.filmaffinity.com/es
    but i don't find any API from this site.

    skip words would be very apreciatted too!

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  16. The next version will support at least one spanish poster provider.

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  17. Very useful application! I have one problem though, my movies are on a mapped network drive. Thumbgen will find them and the list will be populated but when it searches on a movie name it always comes back with no result. Any idea why this might be? If I do the same thing on a local drive then it will find the movie fine.

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  18. Thanks for the feedback.. I'll investigate that and fix it in the next release.

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  19. Looks great so far!

    A couple minor suggestions/requests for future versions:

    1. Like someone else mentioned, crop images instead of resizing if necessary. You don't need to stick to 200x300. If you've got the 500x600 image you used as an example, it can be centered and cropped down to 400x600 and still work just fine. It'd actually work fine at 500x600 too, albeit you'd have some borders in the UI.

    2. Some way of adding numbers to the thumbnails. For example, with a season of a TV show, it's fine that they all have the same thumbnail, but I'd like a way to differentiate the different episodes. Say with E1, E2, E3, etc. on the thumbnail somewhere that's large enough to read.

    3. Support for impawards.com. They've got some fantastic movie posters, and it's where I've been getting my thumbnails manually. I *have* run into a problem with some of their images that are listed as something other than 72dpi in their metadata, but changing it to read 72dpi (from 300dpi or 150dpi) is an easy enough fix.

    Again, great job, I look forward to seeing future revisions to cut down on the manual work I have to do!

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  20. Hi there and thx for your suggestions.
    All reported issues/requests will be analyzed and prioritized for the next releases (after 4th of January).

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  21. Can I just choose a movie or two if I have hundreds in a directory? It is time consuming if I have to wait for each one then skip till it gets to the movie title I am after.

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  22. many thanks, I found your application from a google search and it does exactly what I was hoping it would do (ie: generate movie thumbnails).

    I'll add a +1 for the request of blacklisted words - having words such as 'disc', 'cd', 'part', 'rip' etc. would speed up searching for covers.

    Thank you.

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  23. When I select or highlight of a movie or a directory with a movie in it and search I always get "Nothing selected nothing to do"

    I have to be doing something wrong. Latest version today, Vista 64 bit, latest MS NET framework.

    Please help ... would like to donate if I can use this.

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  24. I figured it out. I have to click the checkbox in Explorer view.

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  25. Right. To indicate what movies/folders you want to process you must check them via checkboxes.

    Do not forget to press "Check update"... to get the latest ThumbGen version ;)

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