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Compressed textures for FanArt - testing here with XBMC 2009-10-05 (r23431) or newer
#76
Wow!! performance now is really good!! i can't believe it... fan arts are loaded very very fast on my ION based machine. This feature is really a must in XBMC; i've not find any problems ATM.

I've also modified IceNine's script to convert also music fanarts. For ION based devices, this feature should be added by default.

good work guys! things like this makes XBMC better and better every day...
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#77
AR1600, using Aeon65, not a lot of performance difference in the overall scheme of things. I can definately tell that the fanart is loading faster, so as long as I set the info panel timing high scrolling through the library is faster. Still chugs on loading the movie poster thumbnail when scrolling and then the info panel with the fanart scaled down when that loads.

I'll probably still continue to use this, because any perf boost I can get on the AR1600 gui is worth it.

One question, if I have useddsfanart turned on, will it fall-back to using a the tbn for new fanart that hasn't been converted or do I need to call the script every few minutes to check for new stuff?
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#78
headcase Wrote:One question, if I have useddsfanart turned on, will it fall-back to using a the tbn for new fanart that hasn't been converted or do I need to call the script every few minutes to check for new stuff?

It won't fallback, so you'd have to do the converting after fetching new fanarts.

Btw, good job on the scripts guys. I made it a bit easier for myself by using the Launcher plugin to start the conversion script from within XBMC. Now if someone could implement this properly in a python script for XBMC, with maybe a progress bar, that would be ace. Smile
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#79
JumJum Wrote:Wow, the difference with dds fanart is amazing, great work! Smile

Here's a script creates dds files for any tbn files that don't have one already.
It doesn't rename all the files like the other scripts and it has a progress indicator.
Code:
#!/bin/sh
cd ~/.xbmc/userdata/Thumbnails/Video/Fanart/ || exit
find . -name '*.tbn' -or -name '*.dds' | cut -c-10 | sort | uniq -u |
while read n; do
mv $n.tbn $n.jpg
nvcompress -bc1 $n.jpg | awk '/taken:/{printf $3}'
mv $n.jpg $n.tbn
echo "s $(ls *.dds | wc -l)/$(ls *.tbn | wc -l)"
done

I seriously can't tell anymore if a fanart is loaded from the 2 sec cache or not. That was the only little annoyance I had with with XBMC. Again, wonderful work! XBMC is now perfect! Smile


I'm not much of a bash scripter ... any clues on how I would modify the while statement so that I could add a sleep xx before the done and keept this script constantly looping looking for changes? The idea is to have the script launch at boot and just constantly be monitoring directories for new fanart every xx seconds.

Thanks for any help anybody can provide.
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#80
Lightbulb 
headcase Wrote:I'm not much of a bash scripter ... any clues on how I would modify the while statement so that I could add a sleep xx before the done and keept this script constantly looping looking for changes? The idea is to have the script launch at boot and just constantly be monitoring directories for new fanart every xx seconds.

Thanks for any help anybody can provide.

Well, easy solution is to use a cron job, i've created one that runs every hour (but you can run it every 5 or 10 minutes if you need to), if there is no new images it only takes 1-2 seconds to run it. Also i've added music fan art to the IceNine script to have also faster fanarts in music section. It could be amazing if this could also be done for movie posters, music covers, etc. I think that right now the advancedsettings.xml feature only works for fanarts, but i'm not sure. Is this right? will this be added iin the future?

regards,
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#81
fidoboy Wrote:Well, easy solution is to use a cron job, i've created one that runs every hour (but you can run it every 5 or 10 minutes if you need to), if there is no new images it only takes 1-2 seconds to run it. Also i've added music fan art to the IceNine script to have also faster fanarts in music section. It could be amazing if this could also be done for movie posters, music covers, etc. I think that right now the advancedsettings.xml feature only works for fanarts, but i'm not sure. Is this right? will this be added iin the future?

regards,

Thought about crontab ... but the idea is to have the conversion happen a little closer to real time. If I set the cron timing too low, and make a bunch of library additions, the script will end up running over itself and that's not very elegant.

Easier just to always have the script running, checking the directory every 30/60 sec for changes that way any additions get picked up quickly and no chance of the script running multiple times.

I'm pretty sure I can just move the while-do statement above the find and change it to 'while directory exists, do' .... or create a new while,do done and nest the current while,do?

Again, understand what the script is doing but not much of a scripter so I don't know what's possible or what's not possible until I get a chance to play. Unless somebody else has a better idea?
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#82
headcase Wrote:Thought about crontab ... but the idea is to have the conversion happen a little closer to real time. If I set the cron timing too low, and make a bunch of library additions, the script will end up running over itself and that's not very elegant.

Easier just to always have the script running, checking the directory every 30/60 sec for changes that way any additions get picked up quickly and no chance of the script running multiple times.

I'm pretty sure I can just move the while-do statement above the find and change it to 'while directory exists, do' .... or create a new while,do done and nest the current while,do?

Again, understand what the script is doing but not much of a scripter so I don't know what's possible or what's not possible until I get a chance to play. Unless somebody else has a better idea?

You can nest the entire script in another while loop, or start the script with:
Code:
while true; do nvcompress.sh; sleep 30; done
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#83
fidoboy Wrote:Well, easy solution is to use a cron job, i've created one that runs every hour (but you can run it every 5 or 10 minutes if you need to), if there is no new images it only takes 1-2 seconds to run it. Also i've added music fan art to the IceNine script to have also faster fanarts in music section. It could be amazing if this could also be done for movie posters, music covers, etc. I think that right now the advancedsettings.xml feature only works for fanarts, but i'm not sure. Is this right? will this be added iin the future?

regards,

As of right now it only works with fanart, since that is all it is implemented to do. Remember, this feature is basically still in the testing phase which is why I have been trying to increase awareness of it and keep the interest level high so that it might go into a more active development. There isn't any reason (that I'm aware of at least) that this type of compression couldn't be used for posters and covers, basically any type of image in XBMC. It just needs to be implemented in the code.

Also, remember that we are going through all this scripting as basically a workaround for the compression not being done natively in XBMC. If this feature gets some active development it would all be much more streamlined with none of this nonsense we are doing now. Smile
Client: XBMCuntu Frodo - ASRock ION 330 Pro - Logitech Harmony One
Server: 4U NORCO RPC-4220 20-drive case - UnRAID 5.0 - 38 TB parity-protected storage
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#84
IceNine Wrote:As of right now it only works with fanart, since that is all it is implemented to do. Remember, this feature is basically still in the testing phase which is why I have been trying to increase awareness of it and keep the interest level high so that it might go into a more active development. There isn't any reason (that I'm aware of at least) that this type of compression couldn't be used for posters and covers, basically any type of image in XBMC. It just needs to be implemented in the code.

Also, remember that we are going through all this scripting as basically a workaround for the compression not being done natively in XBMC. If this feature gets some active development it would all be much more streamlined with none of this nonsense we are doing now. Smile

I can kind of see where this will probably die on the vine. Nettops are only going to get beefier and the atom/ion is popular now because of the gpu ... we've got a little blip in time where the raw cpu power is low enough that the gui isn't the smoothest but the gpu is powerful enough for 1080p.

Does the atom 330 have the same performance issues with heavy skins?

I can also see why people with stronger hardware wouldn't want to deal with the massive dds file sizes. Especially if they're runing Live.

I would LOVE to have the option to use one or the other though! And it doesn't seem like it'd be all the difficult since it's already in there. Too bad I have no development skills. Maybe someday somebody can make us a special build like they've done with the ASROCK 330?
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#85
The whole point of this thread (originally) was for people to test the difference and see if it would work better. If it does with no noticable loss in image quality then it would be adapted as the default way to cache the images.
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#86
I understand. Under my point of view it could be included as an option in XBMC, the loss in images are not noticeable and performance gain is very very big, but also, as others have pointed before, required sotorage space is greater. For nettop computer users, like me, this feature is not an option, is a required feature because as i've said, the performance gain is very big.

So my vote is, yes, please add this feature to XBMC Smile but it's only my opinion i hope that others also have the same point of view. I think that the best solution is to add a checkbox in XBMC to enable or not this image format, it shouldn't be very difficult to do and that way, every user can decide what method is better for his needs.

regards,
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#87
headcase Wrote:I can kind of see where this will probably die on the vine. Nettops are only going to get beefier and the atom/ion is popular now because of the gpu ... we've got a little blip in time where the raw cpu power is low enough that the gui isn't the smoothest but the gpu is powerful enough for 1080p.

Does the atom 330 have the same performance issues with heavy skins?

I can also see why people with stronger hardware wouldn't want to deal with the massive dds file sizes. Especially if they're runing Live.

The performance boost is not limited to nettops. I get a very noticable improvement on a [email protected] with a very fast SSD.
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#88
Uh ... found the reason why I wasn't seeing perf increase under Aeon.

useddsfanart wasn't actually working for me. I fiddled a bit and then ended up reconverting my tbn's to dds and then it started working. Now I know what you guys are on about! The difference is astounding and now I'm praying all graphics get handled this way in a future release.
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#89
fidoboy Wrote:I think that the best solution is to add a checkbox in XBMC to enable or not this image format, it shouldn't be very difficult to do and that way, every user can decide what method is better for his needs

I think there are enough options and a lot will not use such a feature because they do not understand it. I would rather XBMC just analyzed how much space it had left for storage and based on this it would make a judgement if it's wise to use .dss for some or even for all (if using a 2 GB usb stick or something). Most people will not be affected by the storage need I think so no need for an option.

But I think that not only fanart but also posters/covers should be included as I have more of a problem with this than fanart
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#90
I'm sure everyone who has read this thread knows my opinion on this being built more completely into XBMC. I do think that it should be an option rather than the only possible setting. Maybe it could be set as the default in future builds and let people go back to the .tbn format if they want to save HD space and have powerful enough equipment that the performance hit would be small or none.

I don't think that XBMC users should be forced into one format or the other, because people who run XBMC on the same machine as they store their media may want to minimize XBMC's impact on their storage. This may not even be a big issue though, I have over 250 fanarts where the .tbn files take up about 20MB and the the .dds files take up about 90MB. This may change some if more images are converted to .dds format (posters etc.), but it still will only account for a small percentage of total space on most hard drives.

I for one am very please that this feature has gotten so much more attention recently. The thread seemed dead for several months before we all got together on it, and I hope that the attention will spur some consideration from the developers so that this becomes much more of an "official" feature rather than the testing system it is now.

Once again, I can't thank the developers of XBMC enough and I know I will personally wait as long as it takes for them to work on this without pestering them too much. I'm sure they have enough on their plates already.
Client: XBMCuntu Frodo - ASRock ION 330 Pro - Logitech Harmony One
Server: 4U NORCO RPC-4220 20-drive case - UnRAID 5.0 - 38 TB parity-protected storage
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Compressed textures for FanArt - testing here with XBMC 2009-10-05 (r23431) or newer1