Actor thumbs in .actors folder not available as it wants a web server to be running alongside PMS?

[blade316]

XBMCnfoTVImporter (V 1.1-93)

Host OS: UnRAID 6.8.3 Plex Install Type: Docker Docker version 19.03.5, build 633a0ea838 Plex Server version: 1.21.1.3876

Background

My metadata is scraped by another program and then its saved into that TV series folder directly. So the actor thumbnails are saved within each TV series folder in a folder called .actors

Issue

It seems that XBMCnfoTVImporter only supports HTTP method of getting the actor thumbnails. However the majority of users will not also be running a separate web server for their Plex library content, as that is what Plex itself is for. So no matter what option you choose, whether it be Link, Local or Global, you get an error looking up actor thumbs, as it can't do the HTTP request.

Errors

Here is the thumbnails in the TV series folder

Is it possible to add functionality to use the existing actor images located in the .actors folder as the source? .actors is normally the folder name, however some users or scraper tools may have a different folder name, so maybe the option to specify the name of the folder, within each TV series folder that holds the actor images.

Let me know if you need more info 👍

[UkklyDukkling]

@blade316 As far as I can tell from my testing and investigation into actor thumbnail images, Plex only supports URLs. The "tags" table of the Plex database has a field called "user_thumb_url". I have even planted local file paths directly into the Plex database and it won't show anything but a black/blank image for the actor. It appears that images must be hosted on a webserver accessible to Plex.

There is certainly a chance that I am wrong, but I have not yet seen any working instance of local files being used by Plex for actor images (*without a webserver). Unfortunately this plugin cannot change that underlying functionality of Plex.