Backdrops make Alaska slow
#1
Hi Hitcher,

I noticed that, enabling backdrops (I tried poster view) make animations stutter, and slow.

I suppose this is due to disk activity to read backdrop images.
If that's the case, is there a way to forse a little pause, 1/2 sec maybe, before the backdrop gets loaded ?
This way there won't be stuttering in fast scrolling operations, and the general feeling may be better... ?
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#2
When I scroll XBMC wont load a new one until I stop anyway.
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#3
You mean keeping pressed the button to scroll ?

But how's like when you press it many times, with very very little pause ?
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#4
You could try converting all of your backdrops to .bmp.
They'll use up more space but they'll load quicker.

(You could use IrfanView to convert them all to .bmp in one batch)
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#5
That wont make any difference as they're cached and loaded from the Thumbnail folder.
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#6
Hitcher Wrote:That wont make any difference as they're cached and loaded from the Thumbnail folder.

Even when you have them as an seperate file in your movie folder?
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#7
Yes, when it first adds the movie to the library it will make thumbnails of the folder and fanart images it finds with the video file and use them. If you resize your fanart first they'll result in smaller thumbnails.
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#8
Hitcher Wrote:When I scroll XBMC wont load a new one until I stop anyway.

I have noticed that when fan art is turned off that I can scroll through my movies far faster than if it is on. I know the fan art only loads when you stop on a movie for a little while but it is still noticeably slower enabled. I'm not blaming Alaska here as I have noticed this with another skin.
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#9
Avigrace Wrote:I have noticed that when fan art is turned off that I can scroll through my movies far faster than if it is on. I know the fan art only loads when you stop on a movie for a little while but it is still noticeably slower enabled. I'm not blaming Alaska here as I have noticed this with another skin.

If you want your fanart to load instantly then you need to convert your cached fanart to .dds as large jpg's are always going take time to load

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...hlight=dds

You can see a comparison below

http://forum.xbmc.org/showpost.php?p=488...stcount=49
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#10
>>X<<' Wrote:If you want your fanart to load instantly then you need to convert your cached fanart to .dds as large jpg's are always going take time to load

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...hlight=dds

You can see a comparison below

http://forum.xbmc.org/showpost.php?p=488...stcount=49

Holy Smokes thats amazing. Hope it's that much of a drastic change on the ATV
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#11
Is this working on XBMC 9.11 Camelot ?
Looking to the date, it should...
(asking cause I can't try this before tomorrow night)
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#12
neomits Wrote:Holy Smokes thats amazing. Hope it's that much of a drastic change on the ATV

It is! I just finished setting it up and it makes the fan art load instantly, absolutely brilliant.

It takes away the clunkiness that all the skins have on the apple tv and I can see very little if any quality deterioration of the images.

I hope they plan on enabling this for posters as well.
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#13
does any one have the compile script and the batch file to convert the images to .dds, the zip file is not on the thread anymore.
clearArt Concept
cdArt Concept

*If like, thank user
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#14
DV3B Wrote:It is! I just finished setting it up and it makes the fan art load instantly, absolutely brilliant.

It takes away the clunkiness that all the skins have on the apple tv and I can see very little if any quality deterioration of the images.

I hope they plan on enabling this for posters as well.

yea if you can share how you converted your images... it would be greatly appreciated. That thread is pretty scatterbrained.
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#15
EDIT: For this to work you need to have installed xcode developer tools for dependancie "make" and Macports for "libpng" and "libjpeg".

Sure,

First I copied the fanart folder "Frontrow/Library/Application Support/XBMC/userdata/Thumbnails/Video/Fanart" from the apple tv to my macs desktop.

Next I downloaded the nvidia-texture-tools with terminal and installed (it will ask for your password when installing):
Code:
$ svn checkout http://nvidia-texture-tools.googlecode.com/svn/branches/2.0/ nvidia-texture-tools-read-only && cd ~/nvidia-texture-tools-read-only && ./configure && make && sudo make install

Then I converted the files:
Code:
$ cd ~/Desktop/Fanart && for f in *.tbn; do mv $f `basename $f .tbn`.jpg; done && for i in *.jpg; do nvcompress -fast -bc1 "${i}"; done && for f in *.jpg; do mv $f `basename $f .jpg`.tbn; done;

Next I created the advancedsettings.xml in TextEdit. Just open TextEdit and paste:
Code:
<advancedsettings>
  <useddsfanart>true</useddsfanart>
</advancedsettings>
Save as advancedsettings and change the file format to Word 2003 (.xml) and copy it over to "frontrow/Library/Application Support/XBMC/userdata/"

Then all that was left to do was copy the fanart folder back over to the apple tv.

Hope this helps.

@reaven
When I tried using nvcompress on windows 7 64bit I constantly got that error, it works on my mac though.
Also your terminal command for renaming doesn't work.
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