Movies using a still from the movie as the poster instead of an actual poster

October 27, 2020

For a while now, whenever I download movies, Emby is giving them what seems to be usually a random still photo from the movie, instead of downloading an actual poster from a metadata provider. If I go in and do "Edit Images" and search for a poster, it finds them just fine and I can replace it. But I'm not sure why I have to keep doing this manually.

An example, downloaded Borat yesterday, this is the "poster" Emby went with. It gets other metadata correct, and other images correct (e.g. logo, backdrop). But no good poster unless I search myself.

Attached a log from when Borat was added to the library, and screenshot of relevant settings. "Download images in advance" is disabled, but I can't see why I would need that enabled, right? I mean, the problem isn't WHEN it's downloading images (and it gets the other images just fine), it's that it's not downloading a real poster at all.

Ah ha, I just looked through the log and I found this - it appears to be extracting the thumbnail even though I have the "Generate video preview thumbnails" option set to "Never". Why? Is there a second setting somewhere that could be overriding this? (And indeed the image at the temp folder location shown in the log is the "poster" that it was using.)

2020-10-26 00:15:31.121 Info App: ProcessRun 'extract-image' Execute: C:\Users\li\AppData\Roaming\Emby-Server\system\ffmpeg.exe -ss 00:09:36.467  -f matroska -threads 1 -i file:"E:\My Videos\Movies\Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020)\_UNPACK_Borat.Subsequent.Moviefilm.2020.1080p.AMZN.WEBRip.DD5.1.X.264-EVO\ddf261d079924a41b2f4012b762735de.mkv" -an -sn -threads 0 -vframes 1 -vf "scale=trunc(min(max(iw\,ih*dar)\,min(600\,0*dar))/2)*2:trunc(min(max(iw/dar\,ih)\,min(600/dar\,0))/2)*2,thumbnail=24" -f image2 "C:\Users\li\AppData\Roaming\Emby-Server\programdata\cache\temp\0d6bcdea-1487-48ef-b08a-d86434f29820.jpg"
2020-10-26 00:15:32.761 Info App: ProcessRun 'extract-image' Process exited with code 0

Hmm - thinking this through as I type - is it because "Screen Grabber" is checked under "Movie image fetchers"? I don't recall every checking it on purpose, I assume it was enabled by default, but regardless, it's the last choice, and in this case (and in my experience pretty much all cases) TheMovieDb has plenty of actual posters that could have been chosen instead, since that's first in the list. If that's what is causing this (not that I'm sure it is - I'll uncheck it now and see if that makes a difference going forward), why would it be so consistently using the LAST choice of Screen Grabber for every move, when TheMovieDb is listed first and pretty much always has posters available? And it IS getting other images (logo, backdrop) from TheMovieDb.

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