Does XBMC cache thumbnails for images?

Hi there

I am evaluating XBMC as a display system for a photogallery containing many thousands of images. At the moment it is fairly slow when browsing a folder containing even just 500 images, I think because it is trying to generate the thumbnail images on the fly.

So I have a few questions about how XBMC handles photos.

1. Does XBMC cache photo thumbnails?
2. If so, is there a way to get XBMC to pre-cache all folders?

Thanks

...Mike

1. Yes.
2. No.

Once you've browsed once, they're cached.

Were does it cache to? In RAM or VRAM? If not it could be written in a RAMDISK?

And would be nice to have it precached.

They're cached to disk, ofcourse. As soon as you visit a folder they're cached.

jmarshall Wrote:They're cached to disk, ofcourse. As soon as you visit a folder they're cached.

OK, so can u help me?

Is it possible to change the folder? If so, where can I do it? And how big should this be?

They're in UserData/Thumbnails. Read the manual as to where this is on your OS.

You could symlink this wherever you like.

jmarshall Wrote:They're in UserData/Thumbnails. Read the manual as to where this is on your OS.

You could symlink this wherever you like.

Thx. I will try to put this in RAMDISK. (But then I have to do it after reboot again, hmmm.)

Here's what I did - works for Ubuntu. This will copy my cache to RAM when the system boots up, and copy it back to disk when i shut down. This way, I don't have to rebuild my cache everytime I reboot.

Create the script below as /etc/init.d/thumbnails

#!/bin/sh
case "$1" in
start)
rsync -a /home/xbmc/.xbmc/userdata/Thumbnails.disk/ /dev/shm/Thumbnails/
;;
stop)
rsync -a /dev/shm/Thumbnails/ /home/xbmc/.xbmc/userdata/Thumbnails.disk/
;;
esac

Make it executable:
chmod +x /etc/init.d/thumbnails

Create the init.d links:
sudo update-rc.d thumbnails defaults

Go to your XBMC Userdata folder:
cd ~/.xbmc/userdata

Rename the Thumbnails folder:
mv Thumbnails Thumbnails.disk

Create a Thumbnails link to /dev/shm:
ln -s /dev/shm/Thumbnails Thumbnail

You can create a static RAM drive in fstab so you don't have to worry about space - /dev/shm is dynamically resized based on available RAM. Just adjust the script accordingly.

For people running from usb drive with xbmc live or those who has
SSD drives this is not a good idea since it will increase disk read/writes quite heavily.

JM - Actually there would be nice with an option to precahce complete
folder structures once - i have also same problems with very laggy
browsing. I know caching 3000-5000 images would take some time
but i dont mind waiting for that once, rather than to have laggy display all the time. Oh and would be nice if xbmc could store the cahve data as a file in each
folder on the actual source and not on the xbmc disk itself. This would be better for us with solid state disks.

Consider it a feauture suggestion

The-Boxhead Wrote:Oh and would be nice if xbmc could store the cahve data as a file in each
folder on the actual source and not on the xbmc disk itself. This would be better for us with solid state disks.

Consider it a feauture suggestion

But why u buy a SSD when u don´t want to use it? The thumbs are written once there, and not always again. So u use the fast SSD for cache instead of a slow Data HDD.