Saving covers in the album directory

[azertypete]

Hello everyone,

Here is what I'd like to see in some future version of XBMC: The ability to save the downloaded album/movie covers into the album folder or next to the movie instead of into the common userdata folder.

3 reasons for that:

- I'm using different applications others that XBMC to play my music (such as foobar2000) and they also handle the covers. It would be great if the covers downloaded by XBMC would be available for all the apps (this way I'm downloading the covers only once for all the apps).
- When I sort my music library (changing folder names and hierarchy) XBMC looses all the covers so I have to do it again
- This is kind of the same as above: I have a flying hard drive, and the share folder can not always have the same share name, so XBMC do not find the corresponding covers.

I know that not everybody needs this kind of behavior, so I guess that it would need some checkbox in the settings pane to enable/disable the feature.
I also know that XBMC needs the write access to the corresponding folders. So the way I see it is this:
1- Is the option enabled?
->No : save into the media folder
->Yes: see 2
2- Can I write to this folder ?
->No: Save into the media folder
->Yes: Cool, lets save the cover right here

I don't know if there is an easy way right now to probe the write access to each folder (especially using samba) .
I don't know what should be done regarding the file information other than the cover (meta data from imdb...).

Is there any disadvantage for this new feature?

Thanks guys and congrats for this wonderful software !

[azertypete]

Ok, I understand that no dev have time to do that or even no interest.

But I'd like to try to do it myself, and then maybe submit a patch.
So the only thing I need here, is some directions.
What files/classes should I look into?

Thanks !

[jmarshall]

Look at GUIWindowMusicInfo.cpp for the thumb downloading stuff from allmusic.com, though there'll also be some in GUIWindowMusicBase (see the ShowInfo() routines).

I suspect it in fact already caches as folder.jpg under certain cirumstances, though I may be wrong.

[kraqh3d]

Xbmc should cache as the cover as a folder.jpg style thumbnail if it thinks there's only one album in the folder.