[xbmc17]

I have a Revo 3610, a very large library, with DDS image compression enabled. I use the fanart view in Transparency and have enabled fanart as the visualization. I find it seems to lag every time I scroll fast through my library. It looks as though it flies through all the DDS backdrops, but when it gets to an artist that has no fanart, the default Music backdrop is displayed and this lags. Any way to speed this up? Maybe cache the main backdrops, or create DDS files out of them as well?

[kurai]

I have a Revo 3610, a very large library, with DDS image compression enabled. I use the fanart view in Transparency and have enabled fanart as the visualization. I find it seems to lag every time I scroll fast through my library. It looks as though it flies through all the DDS backdrops, but when it gets to an artist that has no fanart, the default Music backdrop is displayed and this lags. Any way to speed this up? Maybe cache the main backdrops, or create DDS files out of them as well?

This used to bug me when the DDS feature was first introduced and didn't automatically do the DXT conversion in background.

I had used the command line nvcompress.exe tool from Nvidia Texture Tools (http://developer.nvidia.com/object/texture_tools.html) to manually create DDS versions of all the backdrops, copied them to my Linux XBMC box and then deleted the original jpegs.

This mostly worked fine, but there was the peculiarity that the .dds files wouldn't show up in the file browser when selecting a background image for a given library screen (e.g. Home-TV, Home-Music, TV, Music etc etc) in Skin Settings->Backgrounds.

Renaming the .dds files to .jpg or .tbn didn't help - the thumbnail just showed up as black.

However - I noticed that when selecting a directory for a Multi Image selection the thumbnails *did* display - even when the dir contained only .dds files.

The workaround, therefore, was to create a folder for, e.g. Music, containing only the single default image, converted to .dds, and point the Multi Image option in the view's background selection at it.

Hey presto ... when scrolling through artists it no longer stuttered when there was no specific fanart found and seamlessly displayed the default .dds background.


I'm using the current Dharma beta now, but with my old library and thumbnails imported over, so I didn't really notice that this had never been fixed :p

I guess I should get around to informing Ronie and/or raising a TRAC ticket if it's an XBMC issue rather than a Transparency one.

[xbmc17]

Wow, thank you so much for sharing your research, it's appreciated! This will make a huge difference in my performance for sure. I'll let you know how it goes.

[xbmc17]

Wow, all I can say is that there is no need to 'throw money at the problem' and buy an SSD drive. My library is very fast now, I can't imagine it getting any faster. Scrolling and selections are instantaneous on my Revo 3610. I have 5000 artists and over 34,000 songs in my library.

[ronie]

I guess I should get around to informing Ronie and/or raising a TRAC ticket if it's an XBMC issue rather than a Transparency one.

can't say much about it as i never experimented with DDS compression.
i doubt there's anything skin related to it, T! is loading the backgrounds in the same way as just about any other skin.

you might want to ask about DDS compression for skin included textures/backgrounds in this thread:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=59115

[kurai]

Hi Ronie.

Yep - it's an XBMC issue. I played around with other skins while watching the xbmc.log with tail -f.

Same thing happens.

Looks like the issue is in the ThumbnailCache handling.
The DDS texture for the default backdrops gets created, but doesn't seem to get read thereafter - the original jpeg is read instead.

According to the wiki docs the DDS/ThumbnailCache interaction is still a work in progress, with some more work roadmapped for Eden, so I'll leave it alone for now and stick with the workaround.

p.s. This can never get said enough - Transparency is wonderful. Great work

[xbmc17]

Hi Ronie.

Yep - it's an XBMC issue. I played around with other skins while watching the xbmc.log with tail -f.

Same thing happens.

Looks like the issue is in the ThumbnailCache handling.
The DDS texture for the default backdrops gets created, but doesn't seem to get read thereafter - the original jpeg is read instead.

According to the wiki docs the DDS/ThumbnailCache interaction is still a work in progress, with some more work roadmapped for Eden, so I'll leave it alone for now and stick with the workaround.

p.s. This can never get said enough - Transparency is wonderful. Great work

Agreed, no other skin comes close to Transparency. Your workaround for the slow scrolling was the last issue I had. Strangely, Confluence scrolled much faster before the workaround, not sure how they accomplished that if it's an XBMC issue. Thanks again!