For anyone who uses multiple media players/front ends, maintaining metadata can be a PITA, specifically because just about every player uses their own naming convention/format. Because of this I have several metadata formats lying around for each movie. I was updating YAMJ for my PCHs a few days ago and noticed that a bunch of my covers had mysteriously changed. Instead of just the typical cover view I was instead getting what looked to be the movie details page, all squished into the size of the cover. I decided to look into one of the offenders, A Bug’s Life, which I had not changed any of the metadata in over a year. When I looked in the folder I noticed that three new image files had been created within the last month. Looking through them sure enough I found the culprit, which you can see below. The image file shown below YAMJ was confusing as a cover. I still wasn’t sure where the image came from until I saw the Xtreamer logo in the bottom right hand corner. It then dawned on me, I was messing around with the My Movies Collection Management software and under the metadata options I had enabled it to create Xtreamer metadata (I own an Xtreamer Pro). What I didn’t realize is that the movie details page the Xtreamer uses is called “filename”.png (i.e A Bug’s Life 1080p BluRay.png). Of course, the naming convention for covers that YAMJ uses is also “filename”.png. When I had enabled Collection Management to create the metadata for the Xtreamer it overwrote all my YAMJ png files, which is why YAMJ was attempting to use these png files as covers. Once I sorted out the problem, I was able to clear out all the Xtreamer created png files and put back the YAMJ png files. Unfortunately this just highlights the problem of not having a universal naming convention for metadata, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more problems like this since more players are implementing their own jukebox.
