Getting the pictures…

Over at the WDTV Forum, I notice a lot of questions about getting thumbnails into your WDTV. Mostly for video, sometimes for audio. Here’s a quick run down on how it goes for Windows users.

For movie posters, I mostly use IMP Awards. If that fails me (mostly on obscure movies from half a century ago –I’m looking at you, Promises! Promises!) I just use Google Image Search. The WDTV thumbnails for videos are 120×180, or a 2:3 aspect ratio. I tend to keep my images as large as possible while maintaining that aspect ratio (and simple math): 200×300, 400×600, 800×1200, etc. If you don’t already have an image editing tool, Paint.net is a good, free, and simple Windows option.  There’s also the Photoshop-esque Gimp for all platforms. Be aware that the WDTV doesn’t like progressive scan JPEGs, save the files as either baseline or baseline optimized profiles.

TV shows can be a bit of a problem. While you can just use a movie poster to represent a movie, what represent a TV show? I use DVD covers or promo posters trawled from Google or IMP Awards for my directories, but individual thumbs for each episode take a little more work.

Fortunately, I found this handy guide for XBMC users. With a little tweaking, it’s great for WDTV users too. Step one is to get ffmpeg, and insert it in your system PATH somehow. The lazy man (read: me) can just put the executable in C:\Windows\System32\. The smart man would edit the system PATH variable itself. Once that’s done, open up your friendly neighbourhood Command Prompt and navigate to your video files. Once you’ve gotten there, use this command string:

for %i in (*.avi) do ffmpeg -i "%i" -f mjpeg -t 0.001 -ss 180 -y "%~ni.jpg"

That command will create a JPEG of the frame 3 minutes (180 seconds) into each file in the directory, and give it the same name as the original video file. You can replace .avi with .mkv or whatever other format your videos are in. If you feel up to it, you can resize and crop the resulting images down to the 2:3 aspect ratio the WDTV prefers, or just leave them as is and have some blank space in your thumbnails.

Setting up the thumbnails

So now you’ve got all your pictures, what do you do with them? Well, the TV episode thumbs are already in the right place, and properly named. That was easy.

Movie posters and TV covers take a touch more work. Copy your movie poster into the same directory as the movie, and give it the same name as the movie. Mallrats.jpg goes with Mallrats.mkv. Voila!

What if you have a whole bunch of movies in one directory, and one some kind of overall picture for the folder, like a general “Movies” picture? That’s also simple. Drop the JPEG in the directory and call it folder.jpg. Note: That is the word folder, not the name of the folder.

MP3s (also: MP4s)

MP3 files can have their embedded artwork read by the WDTV. Pretty much any decent media player can embed artwork in the metadata of an MP3. There are also some specialized tools, like Mp3tag, that exist only for MP3 (and MP4) tagging. make sure you embed JPEGs!

Questions? Leave a comment and I’ll try to answer them.

Please God, CBC, let there be new episodes soon… “The YouTube Revolution”.

Yankee Stadium closes tonight. I always wanted to go there, but I never did. This is one of the two regrets I have in my life. I suppose that’s a good thing. Mind you, I really wanted to go to the old, old Yankee Stadium – the absurdly huge, baseball eating park that Ruth and Gehrig and Mantle and (my favourite) DiMaggio played in. That Stadium has been gone for a long time, and in some ways the new one is a more fitting replacement than the one that stood on the original grounds.

Now, if only the Yankees can bring the new Stadium a team fitting the Yankee name and history. I would never have imagined that the last game at Yankee Stadium would be a regular season game. That’s something the Yankees management no doubt regrets. Good thing there’s always something you can do about your regrets. They can rebuild the team. I can go to the new Stadium. I can see about doing something for that other regret too.

The September 11th Age of Persuasion, originally aired in February 2007: “Leaving Your Mark”. I hope actual new episodes are starting soon…

The latest age of Persuasion is up on the CBC site: September 4, “A Sense of Persuasion”.

Just thought I’d link to this, since the CBC can’t offer a podcast version of The Age of Persuasion. It’s a great show, check it out if you can.

The August 30, 2008 episode – “Branding the News”

This made me feel a little sentimental. I remember how, for years, Ken Griffey was my favourite player. He probably still is, deep down – at least among active guys. I remember a game – April 25, 1997 – when I got to see him hit three home runs in one game. Some dude named Alex Rodriguez hit one, and Carlos Delgado hit a grand slam, but that day was great for seeing my favourite player do something absolutely fantastic.

Tonight, he did another fantastic thing, and I want to add my voice to the throng congratulating him. One more reason I’ll have to make another trip to Cooperstown sometime down the road.

Thanks for many great memories, Junior. I hope I get to see you one more time before you retire. I swear to god, if the Reds trade you in the next two weeks, I’ll have a fit.

Why did I start this? I certainly have no idea. Ah well… time to watch some soccer. In the mean time: Test pattern!