Hi There,

I've had this problem for a few days now in both MCE and on the extender. None of my album art shows up. There is just a black box.  I've been monkeying around with Media monkey trying clean up covers etc. over the last few weeks and have also been using it to clean up cover art on my Archos 504. I noticed the missing covers since I installed IE 7 - is this a coincidence? I've heard of problems with moviemaker after an IE7 install. This is why I'm asking.

 

But back to the black box. Before all this I had the majority of my cover art showing up ok on both MCE and the extender.

 

Any thoughts?

 

Joe

I guess I should have read a little further down. My suspicion re IE7 is correct. You are correct phreaker47 . I'm going to uninstall IE7 this weekend.

 

Joe

I'm having the exact same problem, and I was looking on Matt Goyer's site and there are also people there with it. 

http://mediacenter.mattgoyer.com/archives/2006/11/02/1186

I hadn't made the link with the IE7 install, because I knew it started after i did that....but someone their mentioned it was the next time you refreshed the files in Media Player.  My pictures are still embedded in the MP3 files (can view with tag editing software)...but everything I've tried I can't get them to show up in Media Center (either on my box or through either of my extenders).  Works fine in Media Player in Windows mode, though.

If you hear of a solution, please forward....

You might try opening a window and navigating to your "My Music" folder (or the location of your music).  Change to thumbnail view.  This should refresh your ehthumbs.db file.  If you see album folders without a picture preview, you can always add your own picture (usually 200x200 works best) and rename it folder.jpg.  That should do it.  I upgraded to IE7 and I my album art appears perfectly.

Rob S.:

You might try opening a window and navigating to your "My Music" folder (or the location of your music).  Change to thumbnail view.  This should refresh your ehthumbs.db file.  If you see album folders without a picture preview, you can always add your own picture (usually 200x200 works best) and rename it folder.jpg.  That should do it.  I upgraded to IE7 and I my album art appears perfectly.

Is your artwork appearing properly both in the album list AND when playing a song?  My album list looks fine and the arwork looks fine when viewing the folders through Windows Explorer in thumbnail view.  The artwork simply appears black when playing songs.  The actual artwork was not modified or deleted.

All my artwork was working fine before IE7 and all of my MP3s also have embedded artwork.

Yes, all of my album art appears fine when playing songs.  Some of my .mp3's have pictures imbedded in the ID2 tags and some of them do not.  You might try re-tagging a few songs/albums from within Media Player and see if that does the trick.  I took a look at Matt Goyer's blog from the link above.  There is an entry by a fellow named Egor (November 15th, 2006 | 8:27am) that you might find useful.

I uninstalled IE7 and went back to IE6 and guess what - all the album art is there (no more black boxes) in MCE and on the extender. Coincidence - I think not!

Also, moviemaker now works where it didn't before in IE7. How can MS allow an update to be released when it causes so many problems?

Joe

I'm getting a black box too all of a sudden instead of the album art when playing a tune & having VIEW COVER activated. Oddly though, when browsing by ALBUM, all the album art is there in that particular search view. The black box appears instead of the album cover for the song that is NOW PLAYING.

I also just recently installed IE7, and now that you mention it, I guess that is when it occurred, as all of the album art used to show-up just fine for the last 18-24 months or so.

I also peeked inside WMP10 to see what was goin' on and found some changes there too. Perhaps the latest IE7 install messes with WMP10 as well. I first noticed the dreaded Napster logo in the upper right, just near something that wanted me to select my online music store. I never noticed that before. Anyways, the weirder thing I noticed was when I went to ADVANCED TAG EDITOR when right-clicking on any random tune from any random album. I use TAG & RENAME to meticulously tag my tunes, and I also embed the album art into the files to boot. When I went into ADVANCED TAG EDITOR and looked under the PICTURES tab, the album art was there. I realize that MCE looks for folder.jpg in the album's folder, but it just still seemed odd that everything was still OK outside of MCE, yet I was getting a blck box instead of the art.

Anyone else getting a mysterious black box after installing IE7??

-- Dondi

First of all, to make this clear: YES, IE7 does cause the album art problem.

To quote that "fix" post:

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Ahanix D4 Case, AMD Sempron 2800+ w/Thermaltake Silent Boost HS/F, Asus A7N8X-X, Hauppage PVR150MCE, Leadtek A6200 TDH
Dell Studio 1535

I have a master music library (+75,000 audio files) on another raided computer that I use SyncToy with to migrate the master library to other PCs (including my MCE). I was going to try something drastic like assign read-only rights to all folder.jpg files & delete all the thumbs.db files & the ehthumbs.db file to see if that would do anything. I also looked at that "fix" that was posted and deemed this to be all too ridiculous to start messing around with something that wasn't broken in the 1st place & have since uninstalled IE7 as I await a proper release. This is just plain silly. After uninstall, MCE is happy again.

All I can tell you is that it is possible to have IE7 installed without it messing up your album art in Media Center.  I am living proof of that.  Here is what I would suggest:

1. Delete an album and re-add it by letting media center rip it from CD.  See if the album art re-appears.

2. Install Media Player 11.

3. Check your Active X settings in IE7.  I changed all of mine to either "enable" or "prompt".  I know that those are not the recommended settings because it is less secure but I rarely use IE on my media center.

Number 3 may have nothing to do with album art in Media Center, but those are the only changes I can remember making in IE7.  If IE7 is causing so many problems, it might be worth trying the same settings that I did.

Good luck.

I just installed xp MCE 2005 today and i too am getting the black box instead of cover art on the playing now screens. I am going to unisntall ie7 and see what happens.

I also just installed xp mce 2005 and cover art isn't showing up in playing now.

I uninstalled ie7 going back to ie6 and all the cover art now works perfectly, very strange indeed.

TC

I have this problem as well - I finally got all my album art to appear in the list nicely.  But View Cover is black.  Maybe there is supposed to be another file?

What version of IE do you have installed? For a bunch of us, IE7 messed-up the cover view in the now playing section and the uninstall of IE7 has rectified it.

Still awaiting a stable/proper release of the browser before considering going to IE7 again. For me, IE 6 is fine and upgrading isn't as important as having my album art displaying properly when playing tunes.

I'll echo this again; this is just plain silly!!!

-- D