Dear support team, dear users,
I am a hobby photographer and take my pictures with a Canon DSLR that offers 8MPix in medium and 18MPix in high resolution. I use high quality optics that do indeed have enough resolution to use the pixels. For a long time I was missing a way to show the photos to my friends in an adequate manner. Now, some days ago I decided to buy a large TV for that purpose. It soon was clear, that Full HD is only 1.9 MPix and therefore not what I need. 4x is 7.9MPix and that is fine.
I bought a Sony Bravia KD-40X8308C. The system app "Album" shows my photos in 4k and I was happy. For about 10 minutes. The app is buggy and shows the photos in reverse order. It cannot be configured and so on....
After a long search it turned out: Kodi is the only app that might work, but it shrinks my photos down to Full HD.
I searched this forum and I found a lot of threads about the Kodi GUI in 4k and video in 4k but nothing about the slideshow.
My question: is there a Version of Kodi or will there be an update that can show fotos in 4k?
Or is it a question of drivers, settings and so on?
What I have:
Build Kodi 16.1 Git:2016-04-24-f6ceced
OS is Android 5.1.1 API level 22 kernel 3.10.27 (according to the Sony software information this is the newest version)
The Kodi System Information says:
Sreen Resolution 1920x1080@60Hz - Full Screen (AND THIS IS WRONG)
GPU is Mali-T624, OpenGL ES 3.1 by ARM
CPU is ARMv7 MT5890
Can anybody help? Do I need to buy some external streaming box that can do the job via HDMI?
Thanks for your help!
yours
the Elf
AFAIK (just from reading, never looked at it) photos will be shown at whatever res the GUI is at.
So if you can change your GUI to 4K that will (should, probably, disclaimers etc) work.
Not quite. Kodi uses whatever Android tells us for GUI, which is mostly 1080p those days, and the picture viewer uses that. Behind the scenes, Android then do upscale to 4K.
SPMC can use the full 4K resolution via Settings-System-Video Output-Set GUI resolution limit-unlimited, but expect the gui to slow down to a crawl on your TV, as its cpu is just too slow for good performances at that gui resolution.
@ troggy: Thank you for the reply.
@Koying: Thank you. Well, yes I could change the setting to unlimited and yes I see the true resolution now in the system info, but NO, the fotos are still not 4k. If I reduce the gui to 720 the photos are reduced as well. But unlimited does not push the slideshow to 4k.
As far as I understand SPMC is your baby, so you are probably the best one to ask: anything else I need to configure to see 4k?
Thanks again!
the Elf
Well, honestly, I didn't test myself, but it should.
Would you have a 4K test pattern image or photo that I could use to easily spot if it is displayed in 4K or not?
(2016-08-29, 18:21)Koying Wrote: [ -> ]Would you have a 4K test pattern image or photo that I could use to easily spot if it is displayed in 4K or not?
Here you go:
4K Test
Possibility is that your pictures are bigger that exactly 4K and Kodi is horrible at scaling images.
Mmm... Looks like the Sony doesn't actually do 4K under Android. To be investigated...
Works fine under Shield, FWIW
PS Hehe... It doesn' even do 4K video when GUI is in 4K, but it does when GUI is in 1080P :confused:
Dear Koying et al,
first here comes my test photo. This is how the camera creates it in 3456 x 2304 pix.
Using the buggy "Album" (probably a german translation) on the sony you can clearly see the lines between the bricks around all windows and at the left side a person wearing sun glasses. The statue in the middel carries a sword. With SPMC this is all blurry, things are missing. If it helps I send you a close up photo of the TV screen with that and with SPMC.
https://my.cloudme.com/elf-of-lothlorien/IMG_1636
photo
I could bulk scale all images using Irfan view. What size is best? Fit height or fit width?
Well, thinking deeper about it: "Album" is showing black bars left and right which means it is scaling down. SPMC is not. If you try to stretch it to 3840 it needs to be scaled up. That is not what I want.
Here is a full size 5184 x 3456:
https://my.cloudme.com/elf-of-lothlorien/IMG_7699
full size
It shows fine structures (lens test....)
I hope this helps.
Again thank you for your help!
yours
the elf
PS: to download from cloudme click the image and in the viewer click the cloud with the arrow at the lower tool bar. Not intuitive.
Hello all,
scaling might be a problem or the general rendering, sharping and so on. It's time to go to bed, I have to get up early. Tomorrow I'll take some detail photos of the TV screen to show you the difference and I'll try to genrate some test pattern. I'm doing things like this at work...
Then I hopfully can clearly say if it is resolution in general or scaling or whatever
Thanks again!
Thanks, I can reproduce the issue, already.
Not sure there is a fix, though, as I'm afraid Sony Album is using some private api to display 4K pictures, unusable for us...
Koying,
to make testing a bit easier here is a test image (png and jpg) for you.
It offers black lines in the corner to check exact fit to the screen, a 45 deg line to check aspect ration or scaling issues.
You have 3 sets of hor/vert lines using full 2/3 and half resolution and some real life crops.
In the same folder come fotos taken from my sony in ascending order:
upper test lines with Sony "Album" and Kody
middle test lines Sony/Kody
and lower test lines Sony/Kody
and the RL crops. This is just for information.
If you come up with a new version I can test on my hardware.
I am afraid you are right: Sony might not grant access to the good stuff to 3rd party apps.
But again my question: is there some external streaming box that shows the slideshow in 4k?
I'd be happy to buy one and connet it to HDMI. Thing is, today I have no 4k source for HDMI so I can't say if that works.
But my girlfriend is thinking about a new gaming PC ....
Again thanks for your support.
Here is the link:
TV-Test
yours
the Elf
(2016-08-30, 20:25)Elf_of_Lothlorien Wrote: [ -> ]But again my question: is there some external streaming box that shows the slideshow in 4k?
Sure. As I said, Nvidia Shield shows the pictures in 4K with unlimited.
Maybe Amazon FTV2 as well. Will ask MrMC...
Koying,
thank you for the post.
When I search german Amanzon it offers "Amazon Fire TV mit 4K Ultra HD" for 99Eur.
This one? I mean you say aftv2. There is no 2.
Amazon Box
If 99 Eur solve the problem I'll order that thing. Thanks.