Kodi Community Forum

Hey guys

I just updated all my toys to nightly frodo build (2x laptops, revo3610, atv2, 2x iphones, iPad3 & raspberry pi) and using mysql to manage the library.

I have some questions about thumbnails, but before I ask I want to establish my understanding of mysql and frodo:

-The mysql library keeps the thumbnail location.
-The xbmc client caches the thumbnails/fanart as needed
-The client saves the thumbnails / fanart to .../userdata/thumbnails
-The client compresses the image to dds
-After caching the client loads the thumbnails from .../userdata/thumbnails

I would guess a local dds file would load faster than a centralized share thumb folder as was used in eden, but I have two questions:

-After making the dds does that xbmc client ever have to refrence the original jpg? (I ask because i use Unraid and it would be bad if it would have to turn on all the hard drives when i would load the movie list. Movies are kept in /disk1/Movie1.... /disk2/Movie142 ... /disk3/movie456...etc)

-Now for the biggest question: Is there any way to force a xbmc client to cache all, and make dds of every thumbnail in the database?

Thank you all.. cant believe how exciting xbmc still is after all these years

1. If it's local, yes, XBMC checks periodically for the original to check if it's changed or not. You can disable this by modifying your Texture13.db - compare an http:// URL with a local URL

2. It does queue everything up for caching during scan, so assuming you let it finish it'll have everything cached. This isn't necessarily everything - some skins load images directly from the movie folders for example (which are then cached in the same fashion).

3. You might find that with our new jpg loaders the jpg is actually pretty equivalent to dds, depending on your platform, and the size of the image. The size can be optimised using <imageres> and <fanartres> tags in advancedsettings.xml - my suggestions are 480/720 if you want speed, or 720/1080 if you prefer quality. Note that very few images are displayed in XBMC much larger than 720x480 (thus the suggestion for the thumbs).

Cheers,
Jonathan

Thanks for a detailed and good ansver

1 - Since i´m using multiple disks (unraid) should i delete all my local thumbnails and rescan?

2 - Does it only work for the client that does the initial scan, or can I just update the library from every client?

3 - That sounds good, maybe 720/1080 for the living room / iPad 3/ laptops and 480/720 for the atv2 and phones. - But should i just ditch DDS?

1. Up to you. It's not hard to modify your textures database if you want to keep them local.

2. Only the client that does the initial scan. Others will be reliant on cache-on-demand (i.e. on view of the image).

3. On anything that doesn't have a PC graphics chip, yes. iOS for example can't load DDS art fast anyway - they have to be decoded, so you lose the advantage.

3. I also noticed that on fast HTPC the DDS seems a bit slower than the regular images