making my own fan art for MLB baseball?

[pat_smith1969]

Most of my fan art, baners, posters and BG art are coming in fine and working great. I have a favorite that records MLB Baseball for all Orioles games (hey, we are doing better this year). This recording does not have any metadata for it. I suspect there is none to get. I looked under the sagetv,userdata,fanart,tv area and did not find a dir for it. What is the best method for providing fanart for this recording? I had though of making my own banner or downloading it form some site. I am unsure how to name the directory or where to put it if I manually create it... or if it can even be done manually.

[stuckless]

If you navigate to the file in question using the bmt web ui, and go the edit metadata view, then the very last field on that page is "Fanart Location". That's the area that bmt will attempt to look for fanart for that item. So, under that folder area, if you create a "Posters" folder and drop some files in there, then that will be fanart posters. Samr for "Banners" and "Backgrounds".

ie, if the Fanart Location is
C:\Fanart\TV\Baseball\

then the banner folder would be
C:\Fanart\TV\Baseball\Banners\

Now, if you have lots of files, and as you go into each file, it's showing a completely unique Fanart Location, then you can sort of change that by changing the Fanart Title. ie, if you set the fanart title to "MLB-Orioles" for all the items, then the fanart folder will become...

C:\Fanart\TV\MLB-Orioles

And then all files that share the same Fanart Title will share the same fanart. (that's why series all share the same fanart because the fanart title is the same as the series name)

Hopefully that explains it. If not, then maybe someone can make a video showing how it's done

[pat_smith1969]

Thanks, Stuckless

I thought it would work something like that but was unsure. I did as you described but the posters still do not show up. Is there a specific size/deminsion the art needs? Also I am using Diamond and have posters enabled.. perhaps it takes a bit for Diamond to realize there is art there for a given recording?

[stuckless]

Does the fanart show up in BMT? The first step would be to ensure that BMT can see the fanart, and if so, then try to get Diamond to see (which it probably will anyways).

Checkout the tutorial on changing default fanart by wrems.

Also, when you pull up the metadata for the item, just, look at the "Fanart Location" field and see if it's where you put the fanart.

[pat_smith1969]

That is an awesome video...
The BMT does show fan art for some of the series that are currently not displaying in Diamond. An example of this is American Justice...

BMT says to keep the fan art here "C:\Program Files\SageTV\SageTV\userdata\Phoenix\Fanart\TV\American Justice\Season 0"

Under C:\Program Files\SageTV\SageTV\userdata\Phoenix\Fanart\TV\American Justice\" there is a "posters" directory with one jpg in it. I even created a sub dir of "Season 0" and put the posters there. The poster shows up in BMT when browsing recordings too... just diamond doesn't display the fan art.

MLB Baseball does something similar but here I cannot let bmt the art naturally as there is none that shows up in the searches.

[jorton]

Originally Posted by pat_smith1969

That is an awesome video...
The BMT does show fan art for some of the series that are currently not displaying in Diamond. An example of this is American Justice...

BMT says to keep the fan art here "C:\Program Files\SageTV\SageTV\userdata\Phoenix\Fanart\TV\American Justice\Season 0"

Under C:\Program Files\SageTV\SageTV\userdata\Phoenix\Fanart\TV\American Justice\" there is a "posters" directory with one jpg in it. I even created a sub dir of "Season 0" and put the posters there. The poster shows up in BMT when browsing recordings too... just diamond doesn't display the fan art.

MLB Baseball does something similar but here I cannot let bmt the art naturally as there is none that shows up in the searches.

Have you recached your fanart via Diamond Settings in Advanced Settings, after updating in BMT? Delete all cached fanart and the recache when prompted.

Also do you have "Season" fanart turned on in Diamond?

Jeremy

[pat_smith1969]

Last night I re-cached and that fixed the problem. Thanks all. I will need to remember to re-cache as a matter of figuring out issues.

[wayner]

This brings up a broader point - the lack of Fanart for sports. A lot of my recording is sports so there is no auto Fanart. I have created a bunch of manual Fanart entries but it sure would be nice to have an online source for sports Fanart and to have it be smart enough to pull in team specific Fanart now that Sage has a team concept.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by wayner

This brings up a broader point - the lack of Fanart for sports. A lot of my recording is sports so there is no auto Fanart. I have created a bunch of manual Fanart entries but it sure would be nice to have an online source for sports Fanart and to have it be smart enough to pull in team specific Fanart now that Sage has a team concept.

Is there a good site for getting sport related fanart? Can TVDB not handle this?

[wayner]

TVDB does not appear to have any Fanart when I search for the titles generally used in the EPG - MLB Baseball, NHL Hockey, NFL Football, etc.

[wayner]

In doing some thinking about this - what would be really useful is a sportstvdb.com - we have themoviedatabase.com and tvdb.com - now we need something for sports Fanart.

[KarylFStein]

Could http://thesportsdb.com/ be used? I was just poking around trying to get fanart for sports and found it.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by KarylFStein

Could http://thesportsdb.com/ be used? I was just poking around trying to get fanart for sports and found it.

It would be a start, but most people use banners as the primary fanart for tv shows, and there is nothing on that side that is very banner friendly (well, there is at the team and league levels, but nothing that might be appropriate for individual games). Not to say a banner couldn't be composited from art on that page (start with the the league banner, and compositing the two team logos on each end of the banner would look pretty nice I think, depending on how the league banners are set up). But that would be a lot more than just making a new scaper for phoenix.

[bialio]

but most people use banners as the primary fanart for tv shows

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with this statement - just curious why you think this is the case?

[wayner]

Relevant Fanart for sports is something that I would love and I remember having discussions about it at least a decade ago. I have created custom banners for the sports that I watch that are essentially team banners. So for NHL Hockey the banner file is a Toronto Maple Leafs Banner. You can't really have different banners for each game unless you changed the show title as it is "NHL Hockey" or "NBA Basketball" in the guide and banners are based on show titles. But I would love to have backgrounds and/or posters that are unique to the specific teams.

So for the Toronto Maple Leafs vs Montreal Canadiens (or Montreal Canadiens vs Toronto Maple Leafs) the Fanart used would be something like this:


Of course the problem would be finding the image files for the 30 or so team combinations that you need, which is just for one team, not to mention the (30|2) combinations you would need for all possible team combinations in a 30 team league if you cared about recording all games and having every possible permuatation.

[bialio]

If I just had these three (from thesportsdb.com) I think I'd be set (for my basic American sports viewing habits). The League fan art is way better than NO fan art....

MLB Baseball


NFL Football


NBA Basketball

[wayner]

That's very easy to set by just putting those files into your /fanart/TV/MLB Baseball/banners folder. And that is just a one-time exercise as they will stay there forever and not need to be updated. Unfortunately TVDB does not allow it. Here is a thread that I started on their forum several years ago about the issue.

Maybe we can put a co-op together to fix this? We can store the images on bintray or dropbox or AWS and then have stuckless update BMT to use this as an additional source. Everyone can add the sports that they like include teams, etc or other sports like F1, NASCAR, golf, etc.

Anyone else up for this?

[bialio]

True, but it's better if the Phoenix Core could use thesportsdb.com as a source for airings with the 'Sports' genre (assuming that the thetvdb returns empty)

Then if I end up on MLS soccer or NHL hockey (something that I never really watch), there's a chance at least that there will be fan art for it...

[wayner]

I didn't know that thesportsdb.com existed, so that could be a source. Hopefully it would be easy for stuckless to incorporate this into bmt.

The only issue that I see is that some of the images on thesportsdb are very obsolete. But if we, as in the Sage users that care about this stuff, contributed image files to the site then it should be pretty good.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by bialio

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with this statement - just curious why you think this is the case?

Primarily, I think it comes down to the need for words to easily recognize a show, and the Banner is the best format to provide a 'pretty' look while still showing the title of the show. It also fits very well in a side-by-side dual pane screen, with shows in the left, and episodes in the right.