displaying cover art for subfolders on apple TV

Guys, for the life of me I can’t figure out how to properly display cover art for subfolders (on SMB drives) on apple TV. I tried giving the jpg same name as its folder, or naming it just “folder.jpg” but neither worked. For example in my favorite folder called Movies, I have a subfolder called Apatow. In this folder, do I name the cover art simply Apatow.jpg or do I name it folder.jpg? The firecore support article is not very clear on this.

Thanks!

make sure you have the right name structure. So the first folder could be Apatow. Then inside the folder make a folder season 1 and put your files in there. Make sure you name them Apatow S01E01.mkv and the second one Apatow S01E02.mkv The MKV part depends on the files you have off course, could also be .mp4 or m4v. :wink: Place a folder.jpg in the season 1 map to show the folder picture. After that open infuse on your AppleTV and browse to the map Apatow. Open it and wait for infuse to index the files. Then you will get your Season with the right episodes. That should do it. You can also refresh the season of the serie itself. On the Apatow map klick and then klick and hold on the first season and choose edit metadata or something like that. Follow the steps and choose the right show. Hope this helps.

For the main folder picture:
Mak a picture (1920x1080) with the name “favorite-atv.png” or “favorite-atv.jpg” and place it in your main folder holding all the TV-Shows. On the Apple TV you make a long press onto the favorite icon on the main screen untill you see the update cover option. Click on it and your own picture will show up.

Thanks for your advice. I started from scratch and did everything you said and that did solve my issue, pity I still have no idea what exactly caused my problem in the first place.

If you’ve added the folder artwork after infuse is already setup. Then you have to long press on the folder and hit update artwork for it to look for the folder.jpg file. Otherwise, it’ll do nothing.

This isn’t working for me either. When I long press on a folder, I only get two options:

“Use Local Metadata” and “Cancel”

There is nothing about selecting my own artwork for that folder.

Have you updated to 4.2?

Sure have.

I’ve renamed the image files in my folder to both “folder.jpg” and “favorite-atv.jpg” and neither have any affect on my folder options.

I’ve also tried naming my image files the same as the folder itself.

Still no options to set my own image for that folder.

Try just renaming it as ‘folder’ and not adding the .jpg

On Windows 8 and later, the system already recognises it as a jpg file. It didn’t work for me either by adding the .jpg, so I removed it and it worked.

it has to have a .jpg extension for it to be seen correctly when I tried it. However if you have Windows Explorer set to hide file extensions (the default setting) then a file that appears to be called ‘folder’ may actually be called ‘folder.jpg’ when you make file extensions visible.

Renaming the file to every combination I can think of still doesn’t give me any subfolder options.

What kind of device?

Unfortunately folder artwork won’t be available if you’re streaming via UPnP/DLNA.

All my media is stored on a WDMycloud and an Apple Time Capsule.

JPGs in folders for artwork? Seriously? All very clunky and Western Digital TV Live. Other apps just pick the artwork up from the metadata. No need for this much micro-management. So I have to scour the web for several dozens of images to select as artwork for TV season, or just use Plex?? Guess I’ll go the simpler route.

I’ve purchased and use just about every type of tv box out there, including google tv, roku, android boxes, and WD live. The problem with WD live is that it pulled data, then created files on my NAS to store it which i did not like. It also didn’t update in real time, it needed to do a full refresh scan to update when i transferred a new movie to the box, which didn’t always happen right away and took several minutes.

Plex sucks because it requires beefy NAS hardware to run well with 1080p high bitrate movies, which i have a ton of. Sure if it doesn’t transcode it runs pretty good, but on movies it does need to transcode, it runs like crap. There’s no feature to disable transcoding and the minimum hardware you need to be fully compatible with your entire library is a core i3 processor, which is $1200 in a NAS. Unfortunately, plex seems to have a mind of it’s own when it comes to transcoding, and i’m not going to pretranscode my entire 2000+ file library all to the same format so i’ll know they’ve be compatible without transcoding.

Finding 20 some folders artwork took 20 minutes tops and it took me a few hours to sort out my library names due to mispelled titles and some movies with the same names as older movies which simply required me to find the year of the movie and add it to the title.

Infuse does actually pull folder artwork for TV series. Works very well, it’s only on several movies series that it didn’t automatically download. For the the 20 or so folders it didn’t download, i simply went to themoviedb.org and found the movie. Then downloaded the cover art and saved it as folder.jpg. There’s no “scouring the web” needed, it’s all on TMDB.

Even plex has it’s issues where i have to go in and find the right cover art, or it auto selects the wrong movie. None of them are perfect.

But without a doubt, INFUSE is the best i’ve used. No need to transcode and it plays every movie i throw at it. Even with an older and slow NAS box, you can install an apple TV on several tv’s in the house, plus IPADs and play multiple movies from your NAS box, whereas if plex has to transcode anything, you can only do 1 stream.

So yes, when setting up any file library, there’ll be some legwork on your end to get it all setup, but infuse was easy to set up. Just do it all from your laptop, rename the titles and add years to some, turn off embedded data because some are simply wrong, and let it auto find covers. Few the few folders with no artwork, it’s easy to download at TMDB.

I disagree.

My metadata is all fine. It’s letting Infuse loose with it that screws it up. As an example, regardless of how season 1 of the tv series 24 is named, Infuse screws up the metadata. Yes, any system will require some legwork setting up a library. I’ve already done it. iTunes and Plex handles it fine. I sure don’t intend to do it all again JUST to accommodate Infuse.

The UI on infuse is clunky, no real unified library and choppy playback on some movies. Plex for me works fine, 1080 or not and I use a Mac Mini as a server which sure didn’t cost $1,200, but folks often exaggerate when trying to make a point.

Based on the progress Infuse makes with each update I’d encourage you to keep testing Infuse. I’ve been using Plex, MrMC, and Infuse. All have pros and cons. No doubt Plex has the best UI and some valuable bells and whistles that I’ve come to love (like Rotten Tomatos and TV theme music) and a sleeker look and feel. Unfortunately since I insist on audio passthrough for DTS and I use a 3rd party remote, I’m always looking for alternative apps to play my movies. Infuse gets better with each version update, and I’m hopeful that James will consider those other bells and whistles.

By the way the video playback, for me at least, has been perfect in Infuse.

While I appreciate the debate, I’m still having the core issue discussed here… all the folder art loads no problem on my ATV2 instantiation of Infuse. But it’s not working at all on new ATV with v5.5.4 no matter what I try… and “Use local metadata” (under the long press on a folder) makes it happen for ALL the content in the folder and, ironically, not the folder image itself. Anyone find a solution to this?

How long did you wait for the folder artwork to load? I just installed a new Apple TV, and mine took a very long time. I waited over 20 minutes, it still didn’t update, then went to cook dinner, came back and all the folders updated. Load the folder with folder.jpg, then wait at the screen showing the folder. See if it updates after letting it sit for a while.

Also, 1 of my folders didn’t update because some files inside weren’t recognized. I had to rename all the files to proper TMDB names, so they would find properly. Then tried updating the folder art.

Thanks for the prompt response! It’s been a full day… again, I didn’t change a thing on the main drive serving the movies. Folder names and JPG files for each in their folders, on ATV2, no problem. On the new ATV one, nada. Strikes me quite strange and I can’t figure out why it might be.