[Buschel]

I just loaded in another recursive slideshow with around 9,000 photos and the bouncing just never ended.

So the one with 5,000 took a few minutes for the bouncing to stop but seems if it’s too big then it just chokes?

Let me explain in more detail. Let's say there are 10k pictures to load into the playlist. Kodi does not wait until all is loaded into the playlist before signaling an update occurred (possibly there is also a timer involved). Assume this happens each 100 pictures. So, each 100th picture Kodi signals a playlist update. The App does not know, if this is the final one or not. So the App requests Kodi to share the content of the playlist, which is at this time 100 entries. Kodi now needs to respond to this request while it is still filling the playlist with the residual 9100 pictures. This happens each 100 pictures and the amount of requested playlist details increases each time (100, 200, 300, ..., 9900, 10000). A lot of data is moved around for nothing.

"Debouncing" the signaling is just letting the App wait for the assumed last signal and only request the content then. Last signal is assumed to be the one which was not "replaced" by a new signal within 0.2 seconds (the debounce timeout).

I will try to find a Kodi member which is more into playlist handling to see, if there is any other signal to listen to (ideally when playlist updates finished).

[UlfSchmidt]

Back to using Player.Open: This also caused me so headache this morning. Just calling Player.Open on a directory does not work properly in case of images mixed with videos (this is how my usual vacation material is). In such case all files are added to the video playlist and all pictures are skipped until a video is reached. Pictures want a different type of command with the parameters "path", "random" and "recursive". But this only works for pictures. So we have the next special cases and I cannot tell, if this behaves same for all the supported Kodi versions ... Not sure yet if I really want to go there as there is a clear risk of regressions which will be hard to track down for older Kodi versions.

As there was never put so much love into the picture and slideshow functions as for movies and tv shows, I really cannot imagine that anyone changed or updated anything in this area in Kodi during the last decade…
So the risk of unwanted or unexpected regression is imho quite low. What do you think?

[Buschel]

Sadly it is not that simple. If I make this change, it would be generic and will automatically apply for all other material as well.

[UlfSchmidt]

Oh, I thought you would like to implement a dedicated handling only for images, since you wrote „Pictures want a different type of command with the parameters "path", "random" and "recursive". But this only works for pictures. So we have the next special cases and I cannot tell, if this behaves same for all the supported Kodi versions ... Not sure yet if I really want to go there as there is a clear risk of regressions which will be hard to track down for older Kodi versions.“

My comment was solely about the risk of regression in this area due to the (from my point of view unlikely) different behavior of different Kodi versions.

[Buschel]

True, I was not clear in this statement. But you're right, maybe I should really think of making this change only for pictures. But what if it also would benefit for the case of playing a folder with many music or video files? But for now let's watch the soccer game

[amasephy]

Off topic but… Enjoy the soccer game. Myself I had to lookup what the soccer game was today. 😳 My experience with soccer excitement was at the local “Biergarten” where everyone was into this world cup thing. Haha jk. I thought non-Americans called it futbol?

[Buschel]

Non-Americans would call it simply football

[Buschel]

After testing with different sources I decided to only change playback for pictures, it is now using the Player.Open method which Kodi seems to use as well. The other source types showed multiple problems which I want to avoid, e.g. jpg files inside album folders were added to playlists or the playlist items had no thumbnails loaded. In addition, I use a long debounce timer of 1.0 s for pictures, but a short one of 0.2 s for all other items (this is what the TF so far used generally).

When 1.15 has been released a new TF builds can be shared to see how this behaves. Or you enable yourself to build

[UlfSchmidt]

I would really like to be able to build the app myself, but the entry barriers that Apple has set up are too high for me currently.

[kambala]

I would really like to be able to build the app myself, but the entry barriers that Apple has set up are too high for me currently.

you could use a virtual machine to get access to macOS

[amasephy]

I always thought MacOS didn’t run in a VM from windows?

Anyways isn’t being able to do that coming to an end since Apple is rapidly ending support for x86 on each new release?

I would probably tinker with this a little if I know it’s a solid path to avoiding buying a Mac box.

[Buschel]

Few measurements around picture slideshow with about 20k items (locally stored pictures and some videos), using Kodi 20.5 on a Linux.

Current app version (1 run):
- hh: mm: ss
- 18:25:10 1st playlist data requested, 1st received
- 18:25:43 208th requested, 13th received (backlog of 195 requests on Kodi side)
- 18:28:29 208th requested, 204th received (backlog of 4 requests on Kodi side)
- 18:28:35 209th received, we're done with synchronizing
- Playback starts after 2:30 min
- Overall time until playlist is ready 3:25 min

With Player.Open and debounce (1 run):
- hh: mm: ss
- 18:50:20 start
- 18:50:23 1st playlist data requested, 1st received
- 18:50:29 3rd playlist data requested, 3rd received
- Playback start after 0:04 min (!)
- Overall time until playlist is ready 0:09 min (!)

You can see that the effect is huge. Playback starts in a few seconds instead of minutes. The amount of data traffic, loading both Kodi and App, is lot less.

[UlfSchmidt]

Yeah! 👍
Finally! 😀

[Buschel]

Let‘s see what impact it makes on your system, I am curious. Thanks for reminding me to look into this. It seems it was worth it.

[UlfSchmidt]

I have high expectations

Thanks @Buschel