Artwork

An impressive feature of XBMC is its ability to display custom thumbnails on most items displayed. You can assign thumbnails to folders, programs, music, videos and bookmarks.

Folder Thumbnails

You can change the thumbnail displayed for any folder by simply placing your custom graphic within the folder and renaming it folder.jpg. Note that it MUST be named .jpg, even if it is a .png format image.

Program Thumbnails

In order to display the image displayed for a game, emulator or application, simply rename the desired image default.tbn and place it in the folder where the corresponding default.XBE is located.

Music Thumbnails

Music Thumbs are assigned as part of a multitier process. First, the Tag Reader runs and caches any embedded art using the folder path and the album name. If the album name is unavailable, its cached using the fully qualified name. (This assumes, of course, that you have tag reading enabled.)

Then the code which assigns thumbs to files runs and assigns thumbs in the following order:

1) Cached Album Thumb

This is all the embedded album art read from by the tag reader and cached using the folder path and album name.

2) Cached filename.tbn

This includes an embedded thumb cached with the fully qualified name.

3) Remote filename.tbn

(which is then cached)

4) Cached folder.jpg

Based off the folder path

5) Remote folder.jpg

(which is then cached)

6) Remote foldername.tbn

(which is then cached)

Note 1: Running a scan automatically enables “tag reading” so everything can be cached. Once a scan is run, all your files and their associated thumbs are stored in the database. When you first enter a folder path, xbmc checks the database before all this occurs. If the items are found in the database, all of this is skipped because the information is already known.

Note 2: Using Album Information will allow you to choose to use the cover art available from allmusic.com. Press the "Get Thumb" button to bring up a choice of the local thumbs you have, the current thumb, and the allmusic.com thumb.

Video Thumbnails

XBMC applies thumbs to video files in the following order:

1. Cached thumb. Thumbs are cached to UserData\Thumbnails\Video using the CRC of the path of the file or folder.

2. User thumb. For files, XBMC checks <filename>.tbn and uses that if it exists. The thumb is cached the first time it is read. For folders, XBMC first checks for <folder>.tbn in the same directory as the folder lies. It then checks for folder.jpg inside the folder. In either case the thumb is cached.

3. IMDb thumbs. When you do a "Movie Information" lookup on a movie XBMC will download the IMDb thumbnail if none is available. The "Get Thumb" option from the movie information screen can be used to switch between the IMDb thumb and any user-defined thumb you may have.

Picture Thumbnails

XBMC applies thumbs to picture files in the following order:

1. Cached thumb. Thumbs are cached to UserData\Thumbnails\Pictures using the CRC of the path of the file or folder.

2. For images, EXIF thumbnail in JPEG images are then read. If no EXIF thumbnail is available, XBMC will load the image in and generate a thumbnail from it. These are cached.

3. For folders, <folder>/folder.jpg is checked first. If that doesn't exist, XBMC will generate a thumbnail from up to 4 random images inside the folder.

Thumbnailing Individual Items in a Single Directory

Name the icon file the same as the file you would like it to display for with a .tbn extension ie: Transformers.avi, Transformers.tbn. This is particularly useful for using custom thumbnails for movies.

Bookmark Thumbnails

You can change the thumbnail displayed for a bookmark by editing xboxmediacenter.xml. Simply modify your bookmark as shown: <xml> <bookmark>

  <name>Music</name>
  <path>xbms://192.168.1.100:1400/Music/</path>
  <thumbnail>F:\Apps\XBMC\thumbs\shares\thumb.png</thumbnail>

</bookmark> </xml>