2017-10-22, 14:42
(2017-10-22, 13:21)PantsOnFire Wrote: @Alanon
In my Music Library 'Latest Added' section, I'm using the Fanart/Thumbs List view. It's my preference because I enjoy the album artwork rendered at this big size.
My question is: is there any way (via XML etc) to make the skin sample the folder.jpg at a higher quality for this view? I would assume that the skin is displaying the folder.jpg in the same way as it would for other viewtypes (eg Medium Icon), but at this larger size, the quality is a bit compromised.
Ppl might say to me 'hey, trying to whack a 600x600px folder.jpg into a rectangular space ... You're gonna be cropping the image anyway, why so picky?'
..but personally, I just like to be wowed by big and bold images. The other views on offer, impressive as they are.. the feature the album artwork smaller on the screen. (This is just my opinion) and so I prefer the landscape'y view of artwork like this.
So.. is there any way to make the skin sample/render these artworks at a higher sample rate?/thumb quality?
(I used to pull a similar trick back in the xbmc days to get the highest quality possible), xTV skin I believe....
For example in the attachment, the image I have set as folder.jpg is 1400x1400, which can potentially look a lot better than it does in this view.
Many thanks. Great skin.
I understand completely. I obsess over finding and embedding all my music with high res artwork so that it would always bypass any caching or crap. In fact, that's one of the reasons why I don't really use Kodi for music. 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.
I have also been thinking of a way to introduce more/better artwork, but it just can't be done without removing the upper header. 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?
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.
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. 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.
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. But then, many people have different preferences. If I have the time and strength, I might introduce a global switch for these image treatments, but that's a very arduous task...