Let's not forget that several sites that specialized in user created custom covers have been shut down by Hollywood. Why would a custom created spine be any different? Ken has spelled what we are allowed to do, I am sure this based on what his lwayer has advised him. That's it...end of story. You can do anything you wish locally.

I have no desire to lose Invelos and this program just because some twit wants to violate the law. That's his problem and I don't want it to be mine. You can do it through PHPProfiler or you can even use your own scanned images and you scan them anyway you wish to scan them. Most of my images are MY scans, they follow the Rules that Ken has laid down, but that doesn't mean that some user doesn't have a collection of images including spines, or just spines or even the pretty artwork on some discs...that is his choice locally.

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I wonder if it's possible to replace our thumbnail images with spine images - then set them to read-only so the program doesn't overwrite them? But would DVD Profiler stretch them out to the dimensions of a DVD front cover image?

Someone has made a Gallery HTML section to display custom images per profile: alternates covers, posters, movie stills, etc. I don't have the link for the thread, but if you browse the Layouts forum, you should find it.

OK, I've been having a play with this and it seems that with a bit of work you can get the program to do this already, after a fashion.
What you need to do is scan in the spine images, resize them so the height is 252 pixels and name them in the same format as the "thumbnail" images (upc.location+f.jpg) and replace the current thumbnails with them.
Then go to "thumbnail settings" and clear the lock ratio box. Then type 252 into height and the largest width you had into width.
You end up with a thumbnail view that looks something like this:


For someone willing to do the work, I think it looks good, but as you can see, it doesn't work well with a mixture of images - the normal front cover thumbs end up too small - so it's pretty much an all or nothing thing. Nor will you be able to rebuild thumbnails or edit covers without having to replace the affected thumbnails.

It's also possible to rotate them to go the other way if you prefer.

Northbloke, that's pretty damn smart!  I also like how it looks like an honest-to-goodness spine because, well, it is!

I wonder if it's legit to share spines and only spines (not on Invelos)?  'Cause if it's okay, I wouldn't mind hosting spine scans 252 pixels high (low quality).

I don't know about reports, I never tried running one, but I did notice it made the "collection gallery" plugin pretty useless as it would stretch the thumbnails to front cover shape making them unreadable.

Quoting Mark Harrison:

Quote:
That looks fantastic northbloke.  But I'm afraid I'd fall into the category of people not willing to do all that work scanning.   What a pain!

Tell me about it! Why do you think my example only goes up to "A"? 

Yeah, I do.
The biggest problem with boxsets is that the thumbnail width is fixed, it's not dependant on the image, so if you have thinpaks in a boxset, the spines end up quite spaced out compared to the other spines.