Compressed textures for FanArt - testing here with XBMC 2009-10-05 (r23431) or newer

1. Reduce image during caching and encoding. I'll specify a maximum of 2048 in either direction.
2. On load, the only options are to either downsample (slow) or just crop. I prefer the latter. Given that image caching will downsample anyway, this isn't a problem.
3. I'll look at adding said cropping into SVN.

Cheers,
Jonathan

jmarshall Wrote:1. Reduce image during caching and encoding. I'll specify a maximum of 2048 in either direction.
2. On load, the only options are to either downsample (slow) or just crop. I prefer the latter. Given that image caching will downsample anyway, this isn't a problem.
3. I'll look at adding said cropping into SVN.

Cheers,
Jonathan

Confirmed via DX.... max size is 2048x2048.

I'd favour a downsample (keep aspect ratio) until it's in limits. A crop is harsh esp if it's a BIG image.
I would reckon the majority of folks are using 1920 at the most, with a few geeks like me liking to keep the highest resolution available. It's not going to be many users, but I couldn't live with a crop. I'd end up fixing the issue outside of XBMC.

Something to think about though.... is photos. A lot of folks are going to prefer dumping their images on XBMC 'as is' and these WILL be bigger than 1920. Most users won't want to be having to downsize.
I assume you'll be wanting to use DDS for photos too? or opting to consider the compression inappropriate for photos? (fair comment I'd say)

See r23486.

All downsampling will be done at the caching side, and currently "slow" image loading (i.e. jpg and the like) is done with texture size limits already taken care of.

Thus, nothing to worry about that the resulting cache load is cropped - it's merely there to ensure we don't run amok over memory etc.

Will you let us know when this goes truly 'live' and we can ditch the advanced settings option (unless you intend to keep that / reverse it to force jpg is need be)?

It might be nice as an interim measure to keep the advanced settings option, but you're creating the DDS format thumbs behind the scenes and side by side with your traditional jpg thumbs... then finally phase out the jpg's once it's clear you're bug free ;-)

Oh, and, what happens if one day, you do ditch the jpg cache altogether, but someone restores an older backup? will you provide an update tool, or have a check in the code for it?

What say you?

It'll be AGES before the new imagecache is up and running, and when it is there'll be no upgrade functionality from old stuff built in - it'll require a full rescrape. Someone might take the time to write an upgrade tool, but that someone won't be me.

Obviously when things are getting close I'll publish full details etc. I wouldn't expect it to be done until the new year at the earliest.

Cheers,
Jonathan

Wow! I tried this on my ASRock 330, and the speed improvement when loading the fanart is amazing! It's literally instant and makes for a much smoother experience scrolling through the movie/tv-show list. No more 1-2 second delay before the CPU has decompressed the image. I really really hope this will be the default soon, and even though the images takes a bit more space, it's well worth it considering how much faster it is.

Is this still in the works, or is it more or less finished somewhere deep in the code? I'm very interested since I recently got an ASRock Ion 330 and have been looking for every way I can optimize the GUI and this seems like a promising way. I have looked around the forums a bit for more information but it doesn't seem to be being discussed much. Does this work on linux or just Windows versions of XBMC? I am running the latest SVN from the Team XBMC PPA on Ubuntu 9.10. Based on my research on the web it looks like the images would still need to be converted on a Windows machine, fine I have one around, but does the decoding still work on Linux? Will conversion ever be built into XBMC so they are converted when they are initially cached? Is setting this in advancedsettings.xml still required? I am at a bit of a higher version than r23431, I'm on r26540.

I would also like to try this out on my Revo AR1600. Did the idea get dropped? Would love to get the Makedds file and give it a shot.

Any help appreciated. Keep up the great work!

Thanks,
t

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