[pkscout]

New Beta Available (3.2.0~beta1)
- added option to pause slideshow when playback pauses
- override slideshow no longer resets at each song change
- fix for AS not reloading settings properly when in daemon mode
- fixes for miscellaneous UTF8 errors
- internal change to the way the main thread talks to the slideshow thread

Available as usual from my beta repo.  This is probably a good time to mention that if you were testing the 3.1.0 betas and don't feel the need to keep testing that you should delete my beta repo.  If you get this update and didn't want it, uninstall the 3.2.0 beta, reinstall 3.1.0 from the main Kodi repo, and (as I just mentioned, delete my beta repo).

Thanks a bunch for these fixes! I actually got the second feature working in a hackish way (commented out three lines inside artistslideshow.py - self._clear_properties, self._use_correct_artwork, self._trim_cache inside the main loop in Main, __init__), but having a proper solution is always better.

Now the black screen only happens when I start the slideshow (not at every song change), but it's still annoying that it takes 94 seconds for slideshow to start. It's either very slow in reading the 16,000 jpeg file names over SMB, or slow in randomly re-shuffling the list. I'll be testing both assumptions - first by copying all my files to the local file system and using that as the override folder, and then by disabling the random pictures mode.

Copying all files to my SD card is a problem though, as Kodi insists on caching all my images (~30GB in total), so I won't have space when everything is cached. Perhaps caching is disabled when files are local? I'll test that. If not, I need to find a way to disable fanart caching, as it occupies space, wears off my SD card, slows down everything, messes up with the quality of my photos, and is totally unnecessary in my case (all my images are properly downscaled to 4K resolution, and my connection to the remote folder is over gigabit ethernet).

@pkscout - perhaps you can provide some pointers to where I can tinker with the code to disable fanart caching? I noticed that when an image is scraped for the first time, it is shown directly in the slideshow, the second time and so on - it is read from the cached version. So I'm thinking if I can modify a line of code to prevent Kodi creating a cached version of an image, this would do the trick. 

I manually walked the code for first start, and I think I found the place that is holding things up.  As it currently stands, AS will basically not show an image until every image in a directory is loaded.  I hadn't really intended that to be true, but I hadn't noticed it because most of the time there aren't  more than 100 - 200 images (my largest folder of artist images is 174) for a given artist and they're, at best, 1080p. So for most use cases there's almost no difference between loading one image immediately and waiting for them all to get loaded.  I changed the order of operations in the Slideshow display loop and I think it should now load an image much earlier.  I'll post a new beta in a bit with that change.

As for caching, the Kodi caching mechanism is built into the core of the program, and I don't think you can disable that.  If you haven't seen it yet, here's the Kodi wiki page on caching:

https://kodi.wiki/view/Artwork/Cache

The only thing you could do is to use something like Texture Cache Maintenance utility to automate the deletion of the cache, but I suspect that will have some unintended consequences.