Ah i didn’t read up I just read the comment before. @magico77 have you set the path to the actor folder in the agent settings?
No, actually didn’t know there was one…
So how does that work?
I don’t use it but from what i can see you just add your global actors folder or path to your movie library and it’ll find the actors .jpgs inside it
I did it but it doesn’t work
Try removing the spaces from the image path. https://github.com/gboudreau/XBMCnfoMoviesImporter.bundle/issues/110
I looked through all of the information I could find on that agent but nothing on that feature or how to setup anything… Just the installation…
Actually there are a number of issues posted for this feature, they just don’t seem to get resolved.
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I did some testing this afternoon…
I found a way to get Plex to pull the actor images from a single folder…
It’s not easy… Required a file server…
No real automated way to do it, that is if you have 100 movies each with 10 actors you will have to make a 1000 edits, capture 1000 actor images. No small task.
And in testing I came across actors listed in movies that have the correct actor name but is the wrong person… so now you have to have a way of identifying individual actors so those with the same name can be matched manually. And I couldn’t find an easy way to fix the miss matched actor, since Plex doesn’t let you edit that information.
And just changing it in the NFO file didn’t help, Update metadata didn’t want to work, most likely would have to remove it Plex dance and re-add it,
All that just to get an image…
And Plex doesn’t even show an actor’s profile… (thought it did back in the days)
Hey there. Do the two agents still work with Plex without issues? Is it recommended to still use these importers?
Thanks so much! In 2020 you’ve made Plex a usable product for me. NFO is clearly the best format for saving meta data. We shouldn’t be assuming scrapers are going to be 100% accurate.
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Yes, just setup myself with the latest release and works great!
@nydave69 Hi, care to share how you did it?
I am trying to get my actor images to get loaded from my local machine, it can be either .actors located with the movie or a separate folder, even hosted one on a webserver.
I just can’t get it to work with XBMC plugin.
I use TinyMediaManager to generate my .nfo, everything works great, posters, backgrounds, subtitles, nothing is downloaded from the net. In the nfo, actors have links to the internet and XBMC option ‘link’ works with it. Global option, I just can not get it to work.
With local one, I somewhat got it to work but it is not even good.
I only got it to ‘‘work’’ by setting up a secured webserver, locally. I put the path under local to https:/localserver/data/ and the plugin works by getting image from https:/localserver/data/movie (year)/.actors/name_surname.jpg. BUT only if there is also a placeholder (or the real image) within the local movie folder. Without it, it shows just initials, with temp image with local movie, it shows correct web image. With only local .actors, it shows black screen, no actor initials.
Any help would be appreciated, it’s bad enough TinyMediaManager does not manage one globla actor folder, but I would really want to get that plugin to work and load actor images locally somehow, best would be local .actors folder located within the movie (so TMM gets to do all the works), global actor folder that Plex with plugin would load, I point to X, it loads from X/actorname.jpg
I tried Avalon plugin or something similary called, it just did not work at all.
It’s been a while since I did this…
I gave up because of the amount of work it would take and then maintain.
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Plex expects the link to the actor to be a URL, so trying to use a local folder address won’t work. Reason a web server is required.
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You have to modify every NFO to point to the web server’s actors image. as I stated above there is no way I could find to automate the process.
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I use TMM to generate the NFO and to create the local actors folder. My intent was to create a global actor’s folder. That way you don’t have 50 copies of the same actor.
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Plex loads the image into it metadata folder structure when it adds it, so it is make a copy anyway. It’s the only time that it get the actor image, it uses the metadata image after it’s loaded.
So you go through all the trouble of making a global actors folder and it’s used once.
And it doesn’t save any space.
If you want more information, let me know and I will see when I have more time what process I had used.
@nydave69 @hedena6310_entrastd_com
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You don’t have to touch the nfo at all. Just set the option actor thumb location to global or local and then set path to tv show library or global actor folder The plugin only looks at the nfo if you you leave actor thumb location set to link.
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A global image makes sense given the limitations of Plex. However personally I think that Plex should associate the image with the role rather than the actor as that way you could get an appropriate image when the show is viewed. In which case local would make more sense.
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I am not convinced that plex stores the actor image at all. When I looked at the database the actor record just stored a url not a reference to a local image file. This is why you need to make any local files accessible via a web service.
Whilst I have this working see here I am not convinced that anything other than link is worth bothering with given how Plex works. The only time it is worth doing is if you are going to spend a lot of time adding images where they are missing, replace poor quality images, or re-crop them so that they look nice when viewed in Plex.
@maiade Thanks for the tip, though with functionality it seems simple, the problem is, that the global option seems buggy. I agree that with this option in theory I can get what I want, ex
a folder hosted on my servers data/actors/name_surname.jpg and so on, the issue it, this options loves to hang for hours before loading it whereas local one loads instantly files from the same path (server), but adds moviename in between, and unfortunately requires local placeholder otherwise it loads blank which is strange because it gets image from the server, I can check which one it loads it by replacing image on the server, but still requires .actors/actor.jpg located with the movie whatever that image may be.
So local, as fast as it is, just does not work, as I still need to have .actors with the movie. I do not want to make pseudo links etc. Global. Sure. It works. But takes hours before finishing refreshing metadata. I checked the plugin, I managed to add 4th option. My idea is to create maybe a merge between local and global, so it works as global, but is as fast as local one. It would be perfect and solve everything.
Looking at the code to make local path work as global would not be a problem. prntscr.com/togr3r
I am assuming that the global path getting is laggy and takes forever and would need to figure out how to upgrade it. Or, somehow fix local one, so once it’s getting images from http link, it would not require me to have a placeholder to work.
ps The best would be loading first from the local server/local pictures and if there is no image, from the nfo as a backup, which in my case holds links to tmdb. But I could live with only having my local server working as fast as local option on global option without the placeholder requirement.
@ hedena6310_entrastd_com
I didn’t write the code and so anything I say is based on my experimentation. With that in mind here are my thoughts.
Using local assumes that you have the files in .actor if you look at the code snippet you posted then you will see that if atthumbloc is set to local then it uses os.path.isfile(localpath) to check whether the file exists.
If atthumbloc is set to global then the actor files could be anywhere this means that the code uses urllib.urlopen(aimagepathurl) to check that the image exists and is accessible via an http call.
Just past your code snippet is the catchall where if you have atthumbloc set to link or if it has failed find an image based on either global or local then it looks at the nfo for the url associated with the actor.
Looking back at your earlier post I notice that you say that you set the path to https:/localserver/data/. Is that a typo or what you actually did, as it should be https://localserver/data/ that is a double / after the https:
Another thing you might try is checking, depending on your setup, is whether you can access the image by putting in the value for global that you have set and then adding the file name of one of the files you have in the global directory. This only needs to be accessible for the plex media server so is best tested from the server (this may not be possible if you use a NAS for example). If you can get access to the image from your PC or something else then you can be fairly sure that the media server can get access.
My guess as to why you are finding the global path option laggy is that the global path is not set correctly and therefore for each actor in each nfo file it has to wait for the url request to timeout. It then falls back on the url in the nfo which is why you get an image.
Hey, yeah, it was typo.
I mean, with the global option, there are no errors, it has just loading icon in plex, I can manually click refresh metadata 10-15 times and it loads finally, leaving it after 1 refresh, it takes a while. All locations are accessible, I set it up so I can even open it in a browser, there are no more errors in logs accessing them (there was one before, because I was using HTTP without cert file and curl or something else was erroring, changed to https with cert and it works just fine, it connects). I am running plex and web server on the same machine, but wanted to set it up like that for futureproofing so that I would need to just replace the link to my actor pictures location.
I mean, even if I use local and have the path set to the same https site as global, with local it loads the website instantly. So I do not think it is access issue. With local, to put it simply, when having set to https://localserver/data/ -> moviename/actors/actor.jpg
- it loads image from https only if there is .actors/actor.jpg with the movie file locally. It can be as well txt renamed to actor.jpg
- if there is no placeholder, but the image on link, it loads as actor initials
- if there is a placeholder but no https link, it loads blank, no actor initials
I tried using local cuz I though global was not working at all before, but it is just slow. Local can access the path via http instantly, even though this setting is just wrong for its use.
With global, same setting: https://localserver/data/ -> actor.jpg it loads from this location just fine, but it is like I need to spam refresh metadata so long before plex loading finishes and loads the image. I know there is image cache and I took it into consideration even removing it and starting plex anew. Sometimes cache would stuck but it was manageable to see notice that cache was not a problem here.
The plugin itself is a bit buggy, so I was deceived at first.
Well, in the end I can still use global I think, the https link of actors will be put in plex database from the global option, not the .nfo, it is just an issue that the refreshing metadata does not work instantly with it, movie would be loaded, its assets, info from .nfo just actors would be stuck for longer time before link is inserted. (gets stuck on few random movies) - just tested, it took 10 minutes today to process 2 movies with 3 actors images, 1 shared. Well, it is acceptable I guess assuming I will not be adding huge batches (I doubt it). http://prntscr.com/touip1
Most likely the time to process everything will also grow as the database with the movies will grow, have not really tested what happens with 5k movies and refresh all metadata, most likely it will take full time, as duplicate actor would be just another entry to process.
Maybe using loopback address, local ip or real localhost (as I am replacing it with web link in real use that points to my server) would work better, the issue I am having ,when using those, they are not added to the actor database as links, so I have only actor initials. But this should not be big issue anyway as everything happens locally and my router point this dns to the machine, so should not be an issue… just wondering.
As I am not expert with python, and probably editing it in NotepadPlusPlus is not best idea, noticed when not coping all spaces it would not load correctly in Plex, I will probably stick with longer loading times and global.
I see different route to solving the hustle with it, as inputing links to pictures to .nfo directly, but since I am using TMM for it and it by defaults saves tmdb, it could be an issue also when updating the nfo. Maybe writing up a script which would scan all .nfo and replacing a specific actor with specific link from the main database, or something like that, but that is just an idea for the future. Best would be an update to TMM which would allow us to have actor database to input own links it would use for creating nfo files.
A bit off topic, but maybe my scribbles will be useful for someone…
@hedena6310_entrastd_com
Have you got the global path set to https://localserver/data/ ?
Your screenshot of the actor records indicates that the url is https://localserver/data/images/actors/actorsname.jpg in which case the path should be set to https://localserver/data/images/actors/
Re Python - editing with notepad++ is fine you just need to turn on View -> Show Symbol -> Show White Space and TAB. That way you can spot which has been used for spacing.
@maiade Yeah, paths are correct for the moment I was using them, If I was not resetting whole plex I was using also different paths so plex was not instantly using cached images.
I have updated Plex and surprisingly it works as expected, it gets first local image and if it is missing, gets a link from .nfo when using global setting. Something must have been wrong earlier.
I have tried testing various settings to see if I can manage to make myself get instant actor image get from global option. Everything but global option is instant for me (1-2 seconds), I am guessing that the problem lies with the python’s ability to get an image. Does anyone have maybe an idea if there is something I could do to speed it up, maybe never python functions or something? I tried replacing urllib with urllib2 and importing it earlier, the images were instant but only because the segment of the code was not processing at all and app was getting links from .nfo instead.
I would welcome any ideas how I could try to improve it.
I think it might be some ports blocked for Python. When I DMZ my machine, Python gets like 200 kb/s and gets job done for 3 movies within 10 seconds. When I disable DMZ, it runs around 20 kb/s and need 2-4 minutes for 3 movies. I cannot have DMZ enabled, but maybe a kind soul would know which ports exactly I would need to forward or how to check which are needed?
How do i get multiple ratings working? Tinymediamanager will allow me to write multiple ratings to a movie (imdb rating, tmdb rating, rottentomatoes rating), there is an option in the settings to allow the use of multiple ratings. But it doesnt seem to work. or am i doing something wrong?
and my metadata includes the rating source, but it just shows up as a star rating.
when i scan and add via the plex agent, it gives me a nice little icon about where the rating came from. Does the xmbc nfo agent support this?
