Fanart.tv

Fanart.tv provides role-specific artwork associated with movie, television and music identities, with versioned response structures and language information.

Fanart.tv supplies artwork associated with media identities. A returned logo, backdrop or cover has a presentation role; it is not simply another interchangeable picture of the same dimensions.

Emby's image management documentation names Fanart.tv among image sources. The applicable integration and selected library determine how those resources are requested and used.

The identity comes from an appropriate namespace

Media relationship Key context to retain
Movie artwork Supported movie-provider reference
Television artwork Intended series reference
Music artist artwork Artist MBID
Album artwork Applicable release-group relationship

Passing a recording MBID where artist artwork is requested can target the wrong kind of entity even though both keys have UUID form.

An image provider's record can therefore complement descriptive catalogues rather than establish local identity from scratch.

Role and language narrow the candidate

A wide backdrop supports a different layout from a transparent title logo. Its language information can also concern visible text in the artwork rather than the spoken language of the video.

Legacy v3 documentation uses 00 for textless artwork. That is a provider convention, not a universal BCP 47 language tag. Other interfaces can represent neutral/unspecified language differently.

Artwork language selection separates those cases and the fallback policy used to select a resource.

Versioned structures need versioned readers

The current API documentation distinguishes v3, v3.1 and v3.2 response shapes. Its music album structure changes from a map keyed by release-group ID to an array with an explicit release_group_id.

A client treating that array as the old map can lose the relationship without any problem decoding the actual image bytes. The request/response version is part of the data contract.

Additional timestamps and dimension information also belong to those documented versions; they should not be assumed present in every older response.

Preview and selected image are different resources

A small preview is useful for choosing among candidates. The chosen asset can then be retrieved in the form needed for presentation.

Keeping that distinction avoids treating a preview's dimensions as the master asset's dimensions. Role, language, identity and resource variation together describe the artwork that actually reaches the library.

See Also

References