HQ thumbnails

[verticalscience]

Enhance the initial thumbnails displayed in iTunes and alternative media players using images from http://thetvdb.com

Suggest using the http://thetvdb.com season specific "season banner" in the "covr" tag instead of a frame from the show. Eg: Mad Men has a different cover for each season.

Save the show specific "poster" from http://thetvdb.com as folder.jpg. The folder.jpg image can also be saved in the tag when season is unknown.

[mackworth]

Well, if there isn't an appropriate (series/season/episode) image already in the folder (see Artwork), then we do go to http://thetvdb.com, if you've enabled that option. But then we pull over the episode-specific image, rather than using the series or season one. Why would a season-specific image be better than than a episode-specific one? (And AFAIK, the API for theTVDB doesn't provide access to the season-specific images.)

On the last point, how/where is folder.jpg used? Looking at some of the series images reported in thetvdb.com, they seem to mostly banner type (short and wide).

[verticalscience]

Some examples supporting season posters, genre tags, and folder.jpg.

So iTunes typically displays posters for movies.

The Apple iPad Video apps seems to expect a TV Show poster. It creates its own episode thumbnails

XBMC, Plex Media Server, IVI Video Converter and other apps import a season specific posters as the primary/first image.

Plex media manager also imports posters by default

iTunes appears to display the image from the first episode of the most recent season for files tagged by cTiVo.
Given iTunes doesn’t even default to the most recent cover art, I’d say iTunes treats episode images like imbedded mp3 images.
iTunes probably presumes all episode images are same, just like all mp3 covers in an album are the same.

Since genre isn't supplied all cTivo shows appear in the unknown genre category.

http://fanart.tv is the reported source of season posters for several popular tagging apps and media players with built in tagging.

In XBMC folder.jpg appears to be deprecated and replaced by poster.jpg or banner.jpg. See http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Thumbnails

Folder.jpg may still be useful when TV Show folders are stored on a NAS or shared on a network in a multi-OS environment.
MS Window and/or Linux file explorers can use folder.jpg in place of the typical folder icon when browsing in icon view.
Icon view somewhat resembles the iTunes cover view and the Plex Media Manager view.

[mackworth]

Well, a little while later, this has been greatly enhanced in 3.0. Let me know if there's still an issue.