Mede8er folder previews: A tutorial I wished I had

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Willi

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Does your Mede8er screen look like this:

mede8er-01.jpg


And you want it to look like this:

mede8er-02.jpg


This is a tutorial that I wished I had when I started this excersize. It turned out to be quite quick and simple. I'm assuming that you can access the files on the Mede8er via USB/LAN, this tutorial will not cover how to do that.

Download ThumbGen from http://www.wdtvlive.net/forumdisplay.php?16-Releases. You're going to need to register on the WDTV forum to download the file.

Also, download Movie Thumbnailer at http://sourceforge.net/projects/moviethumbnail/

Run ThumbGen, and select a few sites to fetch movie information from. The six I selected below returned good results.

collectors-01.jpg


Click the "Options" button. Although there are a lot of options, there are two that I found need to be done to achieve the results I did.

options-01a.jpg


On the "General" tab, in the section "Generating Thumbnails/backdrops using shapshots", click the "..." button and browse to 'mtn.exe' (it's in the zip file in the second download I mentioned)

options-01.jpg


In the "Advanced" tab, make sure that these values are as below:

Extra Thumbnail: $M\folder
Mail Sheet: $M\about

options-02.jpg


Click "OK" to get out of options, and click the "Process files/folders" button.

process-01.jpg


[I'm at this point a bit lazy to add more screenshots, you're welcome to email or PM me for more help]

Select the drive/folders you want to scan/add art and put a tickmark in the box next to it.

I clicked the "I'm feeling lucky mode" button and I let it run through the night. Although it's not perfect, it did get it right more than 95% of the time based on the folder name. As a note (see the first photo in this tut), my movies are not in the root of the Mede8er, but in individual folders per movie. This will make a difference, as 'folder.jpg' will be in the same directory as your movies. I'm pretty sure you can tweak the options to make this work if all the movies are in one folder, but I'm not going through all this again to test.

When it was finished with the "I'm feeling lucky mode", I checked all folders to see if the album art was indeed the correct images for the movies. For the ones that wasn't, I selected them again and did the "Automatic mode", which gives you a list of possibilies of movies, you select it and it works as normal.

To switch between view 1 and 2 (in the first 'Matrix' photos), you press the A-B button on the remote. Pressing OK on the Mede8er remote to start the film.

Disclaimer: This is the route I followed to achieve the results I did. I take no responsibility for you doing anything that does anything that you did not expect. I did not back up anything before I started, but it's always a good idea to do so.

 
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