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Beta Testflight access to beta version - Printable Version

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RE: Testflight access to beta version - amasephy - 2023-11-07

Strange. It’s easily reproducible here and happens every single time with any new art.

iOS 16.x
Kodi 20.2


RE: Testflight access to beta version - Buschel - 2023-11-07

And one more question: What happens on the WebUI interface in this case?


RE: Testflight access to beta version - amasephy - 2023-11-07

You are right on your quoting of me. That’s a typo.

If the app directly starts content then no problem.

If you use remote or presumably some physical remote then you’ll get low res art.

My apologies for the confusion.


RE: Testflight access to beta version - Buschel - 2023-11-07

(2023-11-07, 20:42)amasephy Wrote: Strange. It’s easily reproducible here and happens every single time with any new art.

iOS 16.x
Kodi 20.2

Ok, then there must be something else which is different in how we use this. Can you describe exactly how you use the remote (the one from the iOS app) to navigate through the Kodi UI to play back an item? Btw, I use the default skin Estuary.


RE: Testflight access to beta version - UlfSchmidt - 2023-11-07

It seems I cannot be of any help this time, since my system behaves differently. For music album covers, I cannot reproduce it in the way described by amasephy. For TV shows and movies, I can.
I get pixelated images for albums only after I left the Kodi App, using some other app(s) and then return to the Kodi App.


RE: Testflight access to beta version - amasephy - 2023-11-07

Loading content with web interface brings up high resolution art in the app.

With kodi server I too use estuary.  Usually I just navigate to the recently watched widget for TV shows and that quickly brings me to the episode list for the show.  I also navigated the long way by going to TV shows, scrolling down to the show, then season, then episode.  Both do the same thing, always giving me low resolution art.

If I have to, I'll run screen capture from two fresh app installations and post to YouTube but that will have to wait until later.


RE: Testflight access to beta version - Buschel - 2023-11-07

I now can see low res on iPad when starting a movie while the app is not on screen (like UlfSchmidth mentioned). I am looking into this right now.


RE: Testflight access to beta version - Buschel - 2023-11-07

I think I understood the mechanics behind, but am not 100% sure how to resolve this. Definitely this was caused by the rework in June/July timeframe. It's really bad this just comes up just the day after the release, after having these changes in TF builds since months. But sometimes shit happens ...

I can only reproduce this on iPad with UlfSchmidt's description (app runs in background and new movie begins, then move back to app). The error is timing related, that's why it is not showing each time. It happens when the playlist thumbnails are loaded before the NowPlaying icon. In this case the image cache saves a scaled down image (playlist icon resolution), and this is then used also for the NowPlaying thumb. I need to dig into this further. I am possibly misusing the scaling option in this case.


RE: Testflight access to beta version - UlfSchmidt - 2023-11-07

@Buschel, are you sure about the missing images being an issue only with Kodi 21?
I have absolutely the same issue with my second Kodi instance running 17.6… Sad
Sorry for the bad news and for discovering this so late…

Edit: album covers seem to disappear after a track of an album has been played. While also this sounds rather strange, maybe it gives you some kind of hint?


RE: Testflight access to beta version - amasephy - 2023-11-07

Yes, I agree very bad timing.  I wish I had been able to realize it was an actual bug even last week.  The thing is, every time it happened to me I would go and view the show details for a bunch of episodes which would "fix" the glitch and prevent it from triggering leading me to believe it was a one off glitch.

I think I may know why you can't reproduce it.

Try this - download some very high resolution images for a tv series with ember media manager.

Remember how I was telling you months back how the app was loading artwork very slow and we deduced it was because I was using very high resolution artwork files?  It must be related to that.  It has to be fetching the wrong artwork from kodi server.  But to be clear, the only way it ends up displaying low res is if the artwork isn't viewed first and the remote is use to navigate Kodi server to start the media. 


By the way, now I'm finding that it only seems to reliably load low resolution art is from TV shows.  For movies it does seem to be random.  Some movies I have not even watched yet load the artwork in just fine no matter how I launch the movie.

Regarding the ipad issue you discovered, could it be that my high resolution artwork takes too long to load in now playing and behind the scenes the code is deciding to use the thumbnail artwork instead?  I would certainly believe the image quality from a thumbnail blown up would look like that.  Its even more obvious on iPad where the image is physically larger.


EDIT:  If you go to the now playing screen and swipe to the remote on the right hand pane and load a TV show from Kodi Server then the artwork loads in as high resolution.  I suspect this is because a sliver of the now playing screen is visible when the show starts.

I just tested on my Win box with Kodi 21 and it does the same thing.


RE: Testflight access to beta version - UlfSchmidt - 2023-11-08

(2023-11-07, 23:42)UlfSchmidt Wrote: @Buschel, are you sure about the missing images being an issue only with Kodi 21?
I have absolutely the same issue with my second Kodi instance running 17.6… Sad
Sorry for the bad news and for discovering this so late…

Edit: album covers seem to disappear after a track of an album has been played. While also this sounds rather strange, maybe it gives you some kind of hint?

I see that the images are also missing in the Web GUI, so it must be a server issue. Ignore my last post please.


RE: Testflight access to beta version - Buschel - 2023-11-08

Next update. I did a hot fix and I hope we have a TF build tonight or tomorrow to do some testing with this.

The issue obviously lies deep within the patched open source package the app uses for downloading images. The patches were done to support saving scaled images which is required for smooth scrolling. Problem occurs when the NowPlaying image load is triggered shortly after the playlist image load (which scales down to low res). Both use the same source image file. When this happens within 10-30 ms we get low res NowPlaying image, when this happens after 400-500 ms the image resolution is fine. Seems to be a race condition which lets the 2nd load attempt use and cache the scaled image which got triggered before. Workaround is to not scale down the playlist image. In this case the original resolution is kept. This was also how it was done in 1.12.1 and earlier versions. Even though it does not resolve the race condition itself, it does not have any visible impact anymore.

This issue does not occur, if the same source file was once loaded before, e.g. using the info screen in the app. In this case the cache was already properly filled using the source file's resolution, which explains amasephy's observations.


RE: Testflight access to beta version - amasephy - 2023-11-08

Good to hear. Thank you for investigating this.


RE: Testflight access to beta version - UlfSchmidt - 2023-11-08

(2023-11-08, 15:06)amasephy Wrote: Good to hear. Thank you for investigating this.

Yes, indeed very good to hear. Your response times are much better than what I know from almost any professional IT service Smile


RE: Testflight access to beta version - amasephy - 2023-11-08

I was thinking the same thing earlier today.  Where I work it is usually up to me to fix the issue since our IT staff is clueless.  Have a coding issue?  Forget about it.  Thank you for your dedication and volunteering your time to maintaining this app Buschel!


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