jmarshall Wrote:Please read the thread.
Very well, from all of my digging around the net and the forums here is what I have learned:
- The DXT compression system for fanart and other large images was first suggested
here about 4 months ago. There has been some controversy in this thread whether this was even necessary or desirable, as compression to DDS format compared to JPG could potentially result in lower quality images.
- DXT compression and DDS formats seem to already be supported on the Xbox version of XBMC and in all versions for skin textures.
- It seems that this type of compression support has been implemented at least a little bit, although I can't tell if it is only on the Windows-specific versions of XBMC.
- On your initial post, there was an attached file with a Windows-based DDS compression tool and batch script that is no longer there. The file can still be found(ish)
here i believe here, in the svn trunk tools folder.
- Support for DDS images for fanart can be enabled through an advancedsettings.xml setting, at least as of October of last year. There isn't much more information in Trac since around that time.
- This kind of compression offers a potentially significant performance increase for people running XBMC on low cpu-power systems (such as myself with an ASRock 330 Pro). As these kind of systems seem to be gaining popularity for home theater systems, I would think this kind of development would be worthwhile.
- I can't tell if this kind of compression is easier to implement on Windows over Linux and I am not a developer myself so I am working on a very limited knowledge of how this would be built. It does seem that nVidia
offers tools that allow for working with this kind of file on Windows and Linux for those people running CUDA-enabled nVidia GPUs (ie. ION systems).
- There has been one post from someone running an ASRock 330 that used this and reported a significant speed increase. Although there are no other details in the post, I am assuming Linux is being run on that system, so it gives me hope I will be able to figure out how to set it up on my own box, which is why I am pestering you guys so much for more information.
- It's been said that it will be a long time before this type of system is implemented: so be it. As I've said I am not a developer so my contribution to the project pretty much stops at feedback. By all means, take your time. I understand the developers don't get paid and I have loved the XBMC project since it ended up on my Xbox many years ago. I won't stop using it if this gets dropped altogether, or for any other reason. I just recently got my ION system to replace the Xbox (gotta keep up with h.264) and have been searching high and low to get it to run as smoothly as possible while still keeping the look that I like (ie. Aeon. I know it's a crusher on cpu and such, hence the optimization).
Any more information that you provide is always appreciated. This just sounds like something that would work for me personally, so I am selfishly pursuing it (although I suppose the info could be useful to my ION/Atom brothers).