[Milhouse]

@bilgepump let's say you have remote (original) artwork with the following increasingly common high-quality dimensions/resolutions:

Code:

poster: 2000x3000 (width * height)
fanart: 3840x2160 (width * height)

You scrape this remote artwork into your cache - let's assume you're using an x86 system with the following default settings:

Code:

imageres: 720
fanartres: 1080

When cached, your posters will be resized to a maximum of 480x720 and your fanart to a maximum of 1920x1080. That's a significant reduction on the original artwork sizes, but probably not noticeable on a 1080p display.

If the system used for scraping uses lower settings than the default, then you'll see even greater reductions in artwork resolution - the following are the default LibreELEC/RPi settings (optimised for performance/storage):

Code:

imageres: 540
fanartres: 720

and now your high quality artwork will be resized to a maximum of 360x540 (posters) and 480x720 (fanart).

Why does this matter?

Well let's say you export the artwork from your x86 cache, and then cache the now local artwork on an RPi client. You're now converting your posters from 2000x3000 (original, remote) to 480x720 (x86, local) and then again to 360x540 (RPi). That's two generations of resizing/resampling.

And worse, if you scrape into an RPi (with imageres=540) then export your cache, and then cache the now local RPi artwork on x86 with imageres=720, your poster will be resized from 2000x3000 (original, remote) to 360x540 (RPi, local) which is then "upsized" from 360x540 to 480x720 on x86. Eugh!

Also, should you in future get a 4K TV where you might start to see these reductions in quality, and you'd rather now see the full 3840x2160 original artwork and not the lower quality version available locally - you can't, because you're now limited by the quality of the artwork originally exported from your cache.

So my point is, if you can avoid exporting your cache in order to create local artwork, you really should.