(2024-10-02, 23:51)Zing23 Wrote: Hi realcopacetic. I love the skin!! The look and design is easily my favorite.
I'm wondering about the poster artwork. In showcase mode the poster artwork looks pixelated. I have poster artwork 2000x3000 pixels but it looks bad.
I'm guessing it's something to do with Kodi cache system?
All other artwork looks great, billboards & logos are all crystal clear.
Is there anything I can do to make the poster artwork crystal clear also?
I'm not sure is it's a skin design or a kodi background setting.
I'm running kodi/Copacetic on android system.
Any help would be great. And thanks for the skin. Great work!
thanks glad you're enjoying it!
yeah, by default Kodi caches artwork fairly low res (720px for posters I think). You can change this in advancedsettings.xml. Details here:
https://kodi.wiki/view/Advancedsettings.xml#imageres
If you don't already have this file, it goes in your userdata folder and the bit you need for better quality artwork is this:
xml:
<advancedsettings version="1.0">
<imageres>720</imageres>
<fanartres>1080</fanartres>
<imagescalingalgorithm>lanczos</imagescalingalgorithm>
</advancedsettings>
1) imageres - this is the height of non fanart images, e.g. posters.
Default height is 720 and the width is worked out as (16/9) * height. So the default size is 1280 (w) x 720 (h) and it scales the image down until both sizes are within that boundary. So if you have a poster that's 2000x3000, it's going to end up at 480 x 720, hence looking so pixellated.
2) fanartres - this value is the height for 16:9 images.
Default is 1080. Width is worked out as (16/9) * height. So the default size is 1920 x 1080.
Then you can change those numbers to whatever you want, e.g.
You can set the values as you like. So for 4k, you could set the height of both values to 2160. If you want Kodi not to resize artwork at all, put 9999 then it will just import it as it is.
Couple of important notes:
1) This won't do anything to already cached artwork, so you'll have to clear your cache and rebuild it. You can do this by deleting the file userdata/Database/Textures13.db and also deleting everything in the folder userdata/Thumbnails. Do this while Kodi is closed. Then Kodi will recache all the artwork at the new size when you open it. This will happen in the background and can take a while, you can force it by scrolling through your library so it has to show the artwork and it will load it all in, performance may suffer during this period - once you see the artwork on your screen, it's been cached by Kodi.
2) Potentially a bigger concern, depending on your device, performance can get hit pretty hard with higher quality assets, because Kodi doesn't scale them down. So while it should be fine for a view like Showcase, which is showing a single poster at a time (or 2-3 depending on how you have the view configured), you might start seeing lag in Grid view. This is because Kodi will try and show all of the posters at 2000x3000 at the same time, even though the thumbnails are shrunk down to a very small size.
3) A smaller consideration, if you use views like grid with smaller artwork, the scaling algorithms used by Kodi aren't the best so your artwork can end up looking overly sharpened when it's shrunk down, although you probably won't notice it too much at a distance. Adding in the <imagescalingalgorithm> line that I have above helps alleviate this a bit by forcing Kodi to use a better scaling algorithm.
For what it's worth I use an Nvidia Shield and my artwork is all 2000x3000 for posters and 3840x2160 for fanarts. All my logos are within a 1600x620 bounding (this is basically double the sort of standard set by fanart.tv - going bigger than this is likely to slow down the cropper that works in the background so you'll see a delay in the logos loading) In my advanced settings, I use 1080 instead of 2160, and it looks ok, especially from the sofa. Performance is solid 60fps on all the views, but Grid can chug a bit sometimes.
One thing you can do to mitigate this is stick with a configuration on grid that has larger items so there's less of them on the screen. As I mentioned in a post above:
- "Vertical Large" gets you one full row of 5 posters (plus one row of 5 cut off) on the screen at once
- "Horizontal" gets you two full rows of 6 posters (12 in total, plus two posters cut off on the side) on the screen at once
- "Vertical small gets you 2 full rows of 7 posters (14 in total, plus another row of seven cut off) on the screen at once
So you'll probably find that with larger artwork, Vertical Large is the most performant Grid layout as it has the fewest items to show at a time. And then switching from poster view to fanart view may also help as it will show fewer fanarts than posters at a time.
One more note - depending on your device, you have to make sure you have the setting enabled in Kodi settings so that the GUI will actually be shown full res. Settings > System > Display - you can set the resolution there that will be used for the GUI (not for video playback) so make sure it's set high enough, otherwise everything will stay low res.
