2017-10-22, 19:50
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In fact, that's one of the reasons why I don't really use Kodi for music.
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Interesting.. what do you use for your music then? For me, I've used Kodi more than almost anything over the last few years (since my old PC died, I migrated all my music to a low-power hdd and said goodbye to a lot of my old externals (cos I'm running off a rPi now). It sucked that the PC died, but tbh, I enjoy the peace and quiet!
<blockquote class="mycode_quote"><cite>Quote:</cite>
As far as the views go, I've always tried to keep true to the skins general design, which limits available space with all its headers footers and stuff.
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Rispeck!
<blockquote class="mycode_quote"><cite>Quote:</cite>
Though I might make a minimalist view, as it would be fairly easy, something similar to the Lovefilm, only fullscreen. No clock, no flags, just some info and huge artwork. Though, I don't know how appealing something like that would be to folks?
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I think it's a very cool idea personally. The only thing I would think essential to keep would be the clock. This skin is lovely though, I have always liked the tilted section header icons (top-left) (Music, Movies etc..) -think you'd keep those? It must be a tricky thing, to try and go minimal but not to the point where people are left at sea.
<blockquote class="mycode_quote"><cite>Quote:</cite>
Basically, if a trick to do what you suggest exists, I don't know of it. The problem is that nowhere is the actual size of the images specified, only the dimensions of the frame itself. Kodi's own scaling algorithms apply for handling the matching of the images to the frame, and I believe that's where the degradation happens. I think that anything except for 100% AR compatibility will trigger some form of the scaling algorithm.
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Yes I'm not answering this bit directly but yeah the advancedsettings.xml file (used to sit in the userdata folder iirc), lets you change a tonne of extra stuff which hadn't really become togglable options yet in Kodi Settings. I used to use a cool cache setting in this xml file which let you increase the buffer, so that if you have buffering issues over your network etc. you could let it fill more cache before starting to play a video. It was very effective. These settings I used to tweak as far back as Kodi (xbmc) 11.
[ Wrote:From the Wiki:[/i]
"2.4 Library artwork
2.4.1 imageres
This tag is new for v12 (Frodo), replacing <thumbsize>.
Specify the maximal resolution that art should be resized to in pixels. The width is automatically calculated as being 16/9*height. The image will be resized to fit within this size. e.g. an image that is 2000x500 will be cached at size 1280x320. An image that is 500x800 will be cached at size 450x720 using the default value of 720."
Wiki page here:
AdvancedSettings.XML wiki page
Also, if you look just under 2.4.1, the next setting is to do with fanartres (2.4.2)
EDIT:
There's also section 2.4.5 imagescalingalgorithm where you can choose from about 10 different methods. But there isn't much info there about each method. Some will obviously take longer than others. I wonder which it uses by default? (bicubic is given in the example, I wonder if that's it?)
Quote:I'd suggest doing a test and introducing manually cropped artwork to some of your files, just to see - if I'm right, the scaling algorithm will not activate if the image is already 16:9, and you'll end up with slightly improved image quality.I tried it, you're 100%, the resulting artwork looks very clean.
Quote:Incidentally, that's the reason why you have the larger text list and square artwork space if you're browsing music content and using the ordinary list view. That's as far as I could take things with combatting the scaling issues while remaining true to the skins' design.Yeah the List view is great for that clear artwork I know what you're saying.. the only reason I preferred to use Fanarts/Thumbs List is because I personally don't want/need the 'date added' information which is given on that view. It would be more useful to me to have say.. the album release date on that page (but that's a different matter, and not something that I believe can be read from an ID3 tag anyway :-p) can't have it all!
When it comes to the topic of stripping out information, I even think users could get by without the 'sort by:' and 'information' texts on the UI. Ok maybe not the 'information' part so much, as that's a fair title for what would potentially be the synopsis of a film beneath it. But really, once you've gone to the top bar (hidden menu) and chosen to arrange in whatever order, you've already made your choice, so why would you need it written again on the UI? minor thing really. just my opinion. --and it's nothing against this skin at all, it's been that way since forever in Kodi iirc. I also go ahead and remove the scrollbars as they're all extra (mostly useless things to have on screen) -again IMO. Great to have that option BTW - is this something you added yourself for this skin? because I don't remember it anywhere before..
Quote:Of course, all this could be avoided by having the AR preserved or even set to stretch, as to my eye even the stretch is less degrading to the overall image quality than the scaling algorithm.I might be misunderstanding you here, are you saying you wouldn't mind for example a square 1000x1000 image stretched to 16:9 (distorting it's AR)? I think that would look worse than a reduced thumb quality (but that's just my opinion), --and I may have misunderstood you anyway.