2 requests (bug fixes?) related to folder.jpg

[popechild]

I've seen these two issues posted a handful of times before, going back for more than a year, but nothing ever seems to come of it. So, in the spirit of Christmas, I'm going to ask politely and see if Santa can work on something for me.

1) It's currently not possible to assign a folder.jpg to a parent folder of DVDs. From what I've read, I think it may be possible for individual videos (.mpg, etc.), but if there's a folder that contains multiple dvd rips in sub-folders, the parent folder just randomly pulls one of the folder.jpg's from one of the DVDs to use. So, if I have dvd rips of The Matrix, Gladiator, and my kid's Spongebob dvd all under a folder named "DVDs," it will randomly(?) pick one of them to use as the image for the "DVDs" folder. (And in this hypothetical example, I can assure you it would choose the Spongebob cover.)

DESIRED FIX: Allow parent folders to use their own folder.jpg instead of randomly assigning one from a subfolder.

2) It also doesn't appear to be possible to assign a folder.jpg to a folder full of videos, but still have Sage create thumbnails for each of the individual videos in it. For example, I have a folder called "Home Videos" where I put - you guessed it - home videos that I've shot. Instead of the "Home Videos" folder displaying a randomly generated icon, I want to put a folder.jpg in the folder for it to use. But when I do that, it ALSO assigns that folder.jpg to every one of the individual videos in the folder. This is fine if I'm doing episodes of downloaded tv, or something where I can find thumbnails for each episode and named them the same thing as my videos, but is not good for things like home videos, where I don't have thumbnails and want Sage to generate them for me. I assume it'd make life easier as well even for people who are doing episodes of tv and stuff - they could let Sage generate the thumbnails for them without having to manually add and rename a .jpg for every single video whenever a new one is downloaded.

DESIRED FIX: Allow an option to use folder.jpg for the folder icon without making it replace all the individual video thumbnails as well.

Both of these seem fairly simple. But I've seen them asked for over and over and nothing's ever been done, so maybe it's actually a lot harder than it looks. In any case, I thought it'd be worth at least asking again. Maybe others who'd also like to see these changes could chime in?

[wayner]

I agree with you totally on these issues. They may be one fix for item (2). If you create a jpg file that is the same name as your home movie that will be used as the thumbnail instead of folder.jpg. For example if your home movie is christmas08.avi and you create a thumbnail called christmas08.jpg then it will use that as the thumbnail.

The only problem is that we need a program that will automatically create thumbnails from a frame in the video file. It would be nice if you could specify how many seconds into the file that the thumbnail would be generated. I tried out Meedio once several years ago and it had this functionality - we just need someone to add it for Sage.

You might want to check this thread http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthread.php?t=37745 as babgvant has written a thumbnail generator but I didn't have much luck with this app.

[popechild]

Except the point is to not have to manually create and rename a new thumbnail for every new video. At least for my home videos, I use a camera that's file based, so every time I start and stop recording, it creates a new file. I can pull out the memory card, dump the .mts files onto a sage import directory, and immediately have access to everything I shot. But in a single day of shooting I could have dozens of individual clips, and it'd be a pain to have to manually use a third party program to create individual thumbnails, then rename all the thumbnails to match the .mts files exactly. We already know Sage can create the thumbnails, and we already know Sage can use a folder.jpg for the folder image. I'm just wondering if there's not a way it can't do both at the same time.

[wayner]

That makes sense - have an option for something like this "Only use folder.jpg for folder thumbnails"

But what I was proposing would be an add-in that would be automated and may give you more functionality.

[popechild]

I guess this isn't getting much play, so let me just ask this. Is there anyone who knows anything about Studio that can tell me roughly how difficult a change like this would be to make. I'll try to do it myself if it's something someone with experience thinks is doable by someone without any experience in a matter of hours or so. But it's obviously not a big enough issue to warrant spending days or weeks learning all the ins and outs of studio for.

So, for any Studio developers out there, any thoughts on how difficult a change like this would be to make? Thanks...