Store thumbnails in multiple resolutions
#1
Lightbulb 
With the advent of the new scraper allowing higher quality posters to be fetched, XBMC is starting to struggle when there are a lot of posters to load and resize on the fly.

If there were a few different resolutions stored for each thumbnail, xbmc could be more selective about which thumbnail to load and perhaps save some cpu cycles by not having to do the dynamic resize ?

Instead of ab01cd02.tbn xbmc could store something like

ab01cd02_sml.tbn
ab01cd02_med.tbn
ab01cd02.tbn -> default, high res

I don't know how exactly thumbnails are handled now, but I would guess that a possible way to implement this would be:

- The first time a view is requested where the small icon is needed, the ab01cd02_sml.tbn file is created and stored somewhere under UserData/Thumbnails/
- Each subsequent fetch of the same thumnail would pull the _sml file, if it exists.

I believe this would speed up page up/page down navigation in views such as PMIII's Media Info, since the large version of the thumbnail would only have to be loaded on highlighted movies.

This feature wouldn't come for free, since it would involve extra disk reads to look for the presence of each thumbnail version. I don't know how expensive disk reads are for XBMC though ?

There would also be extra storage requirements, but disk space is cheap. Besides, my thumbnail folder now takes up about 80MB. Smaller versions would only take up a fraction of that.
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#2
Exclamation 
No comments on this one ?

As mentioned in this thread, I confirmed that using posters with 200x300 pixels greatly improved the navigation speed.
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#3
Just to be sure your aware...

Latest IMDb scraper allows scaling of thumbs to your personal preference in scraper settings.

When you use "Get Thumb" these thumbs are NOT local they are simply url links to the original thumb locations hence the delay in showing them on screen. Once of screen the change should be almost immediate in your list.
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#4
Thanks, I was not aware of this. Where do you alter these settings ? In imdb.xml itself ?
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