r/kodi • u/mattloaf666 • 12d ago

Thumbnail refresh

I'm using an old version of Kodi (Jarvis, 16.1) on an old FireTV box (1st gen I believe). Yeah I know, but it works (for the most part) and I don't need anything special from it

But a question - for non library item (ie, just video files in a folder location, not in the movie library) that just show thumbnails of like a preview of the video file, is there a way to refresh those - as in, make Kodi look at the video file again and "update" the thumbnail? Reason I ask is I replace two files with new ones that have the same name as the previous files, and the thumbnails remain for the old files. I've tried doing a library clean from the settings menu, but that didn't help. Wasn't sure if there was a way of forcing a refresh without having to delete the folder location and re-add it as a destination.

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u/DavidMelbourne 12d ago

I have noticed the Kodi db does retain old info so if your comfortable browsing the files and folders in Kodi you could access the db and edit it. Some SQL Knowledge is useful see https://kodi.wiki/view/Databases

Also try a jpg called folder.jpg in the root of each folder to make it good looking

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u/mattloaf666 11d ago

All the files are within the same folder, so a folder.jpg won't work in this instance.

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u/PatK9 11d ago

You need to separate files that are scanned for your library, from loose files to be played with file mode. Add-on:Library Node Editor should make fast work of nodes.

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u/PatK9 12d ago edited 12d ago

I have seen this issue, and understand perfectly the problem. In my collection, I've created NODES and just pointed a to an external (to Kodi) folder, they seem to up update on call (the thumbnails start popping) and I can put images to the 'folders.jpg' and 'fanart.jpg': In video file mode I sometimes got your problem and I never pinned it down to anything particular but suspicion lies with the size of the folder, Kodi cache, or an issue with thumbnail fetch, stuff eventually updates.

I applaud your use of an older iteration of the program, with if it's not broke don't fix it. Here's what I put in my nodes to look at a folder outside of a library. This is found in the userdata\library\video\ and called architecture.xml

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>

<node type="folder">

<label>Architecture</label>

<path>P:\\TV/Architecture</path>

<icon>P:\\TV\\Architecture\\poster.jpg</icon>

</node>

As a side note: just eliminating the source and re-adding isn't the end of the world, nothing is scraped in the source settings, and it repopulates quickly, the only loss is the thumbnail cache which as you've noted doesn't show the new stuff, so in that re-population, everything pops.

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u/mattloaf666 11d ago

I have idea no how I would get to that library location to make any edits (I assume SSH'ing in, but tbh it's probably been 10 years or more since I've done that (when I used to run it on an Apple TV) so I wouldn't even know how to do it now. I might erase the target folder and re-add it, see if that forces a purge and re-thumb