Fanart for Sports

[wayner]

I am not sure where exactly this post belongs but I thought this forum might be a good place to start.

How do others deal with Fanart for sports? I have been manually creating the folders (ie. \Fanart\TV\NHL Hockey\Backgrounds etc) and finding some relevant images from the net. But this only helps with backgrounds and not with banners.

Anyone have a better idea on a semi-automated way of creating Fanart for sporting events. It would be nice if the Fanart was even specifict to the actual game - i.e. if the event was an NFL game between the Packers and Bears that you would get Fanart that would be photos of previous games between the Packers and Bears.

[Fuzzy]

Game specific would be difficult. It could be done with some creative studio work. As for it working in the current fanart plugins, it would be difficult. I'm not sure how you could make 'episode-specific' fanart be pulled uniquely by the phoenix api (in it's current form). It might be worth discussing some additions to the 'Central Fanart' structure, where you could perhaps have some additional folder for sports...

[FanArt_Folder]/Sports/NFL Football/TeamLogos/San Diego Chargers/bolt.jpg
[FanArt_Folder]/Sports/NFL Football/Backgrounds/field.jpg

So the phoenix_api_GetFanartBackground(Object mediaObject) Would have to check if the title of the show is in the Sports folder ("NFL Football"). If so, it would have to parse the team names from the Episode Title, superimpose those images onto the nfl football background image, and pass that composited image back to the UI. It would work well this way, but it's a lot of work to put on Sean...

Like I said, it'd be 'easier' to make a UI_mod that depends on Phoenix Fanart for Default7 and Malore plugins to add a couple extra image objects on top of the background image that would be pulled from the sports folders... either are possible... neither might get done by someone.. :-)

[wayner]

OK, then let's get back to basics. I would settle for getting any Fanart, at least Backgrounds, Posters and Banners, for the basic sporting events such as NFL Football, MLB Baseball, NBA Basketball, NHL Hockey, PGATour Golf, etc. TVDB doesn't seem to carry anything for these, perhaps since they don't lend themselves to a database of episodes, etc.

By the way, I am not sure that it is used but it appears that BMT is pulling Fanart for episodes in some instances.

For example I have a Fanart/TV/Dora The Explorer/Season 1/Episodes folder with files such as 0004.jpg, 0009.jpg, etc.

There are also Fanart/TV/Dora The Explorer/Season 1/Posters folders that are definitely being used.

[tmiranda]

I resorted to trawling the web for images that I could download.

[Tiki]

The problem is that the source for most TV-related fanart (thetvdb.com) has a written policy that they don't want any sports-related fanart on their site.

Phoenix (BMT) just scrapes known repositories for fanart (primarily thetvdb.com for television and imdb.com for movies). It can be setup with custom scrapers for any other site you can find (assuming you can find a good site and are willing to write the scraping script or can find someone else to write it).

Phoenix (BMT) is capable of grabbing and storing season and episode specific images if they are there. It's then up to whatever plugin you use to figure out how/if to display the various types of fanart (some only use backgrounds, some use backgrounds, posters, and banners, some use general fanart and others use the season/episode specific).

I think the plugins that display the specific fan art, only work with shows where the season# and episode# is available (this does not come automatically with the guide data from Sage, but it does get populated by Phoenix/BMT at least for imported TV shows). Sports don't have a Season/Episode #, so something new would have to be worked out to make that work (probably would need to scrape the show description and hope that it listed the teams in some consistent way - could be "The Packers" or "Green Bay" or "G. Bay", etc. - so that you could label the fan art to match).

Since there is no sports fanart to begin with, you aren't going to find any episode-specific fan art anyway (unless you create it).

For my own use, I made a handful of custom banners and backgrounds for sports, mostly using images I found on the web.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by Tiki

The problem is that the source for most TV-related fanart (thetvdb.com) has a written policy that they don't want any sports-related fanart on their site.

What's the reason for this?

Maybe we could create a Sage users collection of Fanart for sports? SRE must already do some of this parsing of team names since its job is somewhat more complex than just finding Fanart.