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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
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1. Yes.
2. No.
Once you've browsed once, they're cached.
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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.
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They're cached to disk, ofcourse. As soon as you visit a folder they're cached.
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They're in UserData/Thumbnails. Read the manual as to where this is on your OS.
You could symlink this wherever you like.
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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.
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I've actually installed aufs on my Ubuntu installation. All my writes now occur to a ram disk - so my flash is read-only. I then have a script that upon shutdown of the box sync's just the database files and cached thumbnails to flash.
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Hi
I have an issue that my photos are previewed very slow. I read here thumbs of the photos are cached after the dir is opened the first time. Will this be done recursively? is there a way to cache all photos from the top dir all the way down in the dir structure?
I also read somewhere that xbmc looks first to the exif thumbs before to look to the cache thumbs. Will there be cache thumbs created when exif thumbs exists of a photo? could it be set the other way around (first look to cache then to exif) because locally stored thumbs are faster then NAS stored exif thumbs?
thnx in advance
Paddy