Terrible Poster Resize Quality
#1
Hi, I have posted this over at the aeon skin forum but it was determined its probably xbmc's responsibility.

Its relating to the scaling of posters (and perhaps other image data) in xbmc. It seems to me as if there is either a very bad scaling algorithm used to scale poster data, or perhaps something to do with my graphics card scaling....

I try to keep my fanart and posters as high resolution as possible. Below you can see a 1000 x 1500 pixel poster for the movie "Quantum Of Solace". The information dialog of aeon65 seems to show a blurry low resolution version of this poster. Its definitely reading my local copy as when I draw a few scribbles and reload, I can see its definitely reading my local copy.

See the difference below between this 1000 x 1500 px image resized to 720 x 1080 in photoshop versus the same image resized to the same size in the information dialog in aeon65.... Huge difference. I always had a feeling the image seen in xbmc didn't quite look as good as the same image when opened in microsoft paint..

Warning: Image below is ~2mb as its a png.

Image

I'll create as an xbmc bug / feature request if no objections..
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#2
Are the posters named movie.tbn? Not sure if this is still applicable or not, but I have all my movies in folders and the posters all named movie.tbn and the fullscreen info looks great to me.
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#3
Wow this is really strange!! Hopefully someone can figure this out. I use folder.jpg for my posters. Below are three images for another movie I picked at random..... Octopussy.

1) After reloading movie data just to be sure local folder.jpg was read. It was read and showed up blurry again of course. -> http://img824.imageshack.us/i/screenshot005p.png/
2) After renaming the file to movie.tbn and reloading data again, all looks really sharp and clear again. -> http://img191.imageshack.us/i/screenshot006z.png/
3) After renaming back to folder.jpg, its showing up as really sharp again (what the ....)..... -> http://img412.imageshack.us/i/screenshot007a.png/

I choose every time to not download data from the internet so can anyone explain what might cause this. Its the same for most of my movies.. so I can reproduce over and over if needs be...
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#4
What size do you have set as the thumb resolution? By default XBMC uses 512, which would give an image of size around 700x400 for this poster.

It may be that under some circumstances we ignore that (re)sizing and just cache directly. The Debug Log probably has this information.
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#5
Thanks jmarshall, the debug log and your input revealed the "problem". I have my thumbs as high as I can get them, scraped using Ember Media Manager, so most of them are 1000 x 1500 which looks gorgeous in xbmc if it will actually load them without resizing them down to 512.

So I have a new movie that I have noticed very blurry poster in xbmc using folder.jpg. Its "The Losers". The debug log shows errors when trying to load movie.tbn (as I don't have a movie.tbn) and it also shows it did resize the folder.jpg to 512....

22:56:30 T:4924 M:3780911104 DEBUG: CVideoDatabase::GetMovieId (G:\New Films\The Losers (2010)\The Losers.avi), query = select idMovie from movie where idFile=1177
22:56:31 T:4924 M:3780595712 DEBUG: Previous line repeats 1 times.
22:56:31 T:4924 M:3780595712 INFO: Caching image from: G:\New Films\The Losers (2010)\fanart.jpg to special://masterprofile/Thumbnails/Video/Fanart/4eb61d49.tbn
22:56:31 T:4924 M:3780587520 INFO: Caching image from: G:\New Films\The Losers (2010)\folder.jpg to special://masterprofile/Thumbnails/Video/4/4eb61d49.tbn with width 512 and height 512
22:56:31 T:4924 M:3779018752 DEBUG: CVideoDatabase::GetMovieId (G:\New Films\The Losers (2010)\The Losers.avi), query = select idMovie from movie where idFile=1177
22:56:31 T:4924 M:3780206592 DEBUG: ------ Window Init (DialogVideoInfo.xml) ------
22:56:31 T:4924 M:3780206592 INFO: Loading skin file: DialogVideoInfo.xml
22:56:31 T:4924 M:3780165632 DEBUG: Load DialogVideoInfo.xml: 15.88ms
22:56:31 T:4924 M:3780165632 DEBUG: Alloc resources: 15.90ms (15.90 ms skin load)
22:56:31 T:3052 M:3748802560 DEBUG: CTextureCache::GetImageHash - unable to stat url G:\New Films\The Losers (2010)\movie.tbn
22:56:31 T:3052 M:3748798464 DEBUG: msg: PICTURE::LoadImage: Unable to open image: G:\New Films\The Losers (2010)\movie.tbn Error: (2)
22:56:31 T:3052 M:3748798464 ERROR: Texture manager unable to load file: G:\New Films\The Losers (2010)\movie.tbn


And when renamed to movie.tbn, I get a gorgeous full size poster Smile, see debug lot shows it loaded it full size.

23:02:20 T:4052 M:3781410816 DEBUG: Alloc resources: 18.55ms (18.54 ms skin load)
23:02:20 T:1008 M:3778011136 DEBUG: Caching image 'G:\New Films\The Losers (2010)\movie.tbn' as '7/7625abfb.tbn' full size
23:02:20 T:1008 M:3778011136 INFO: Caching image from: G:\New Films\The Losers (2010)\movie.tbn to special://masterprofile/Thumbnails/7/7625abfb.tbn
23:02:20 T:1008 M:3758559232 DEBUG: CImageLoader:Big GrinoWork - took 138 ms to load G:\New Films\The Losers (2010)\movie.tbn
23:02:22 T:4052 M:3774754816 DEBUG: SDLKeyboard: scancode: 77, sym: 275, unicode: 0, modifier: 0


So what should I request in the bug report, that folder.jpg (and any others that are scaled down) not be scaled down as it really sacrifices quality or is it something thats easy to sort out without a report? Has the tbn somehow got preference over others.... It seems from above that even after loading folder.jpg, movie.tbn is searched for after that.. Thanks again Smile
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#6
Ticket created here to track this problem. http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/9812

Hopefully all types of poster can be imported like movie.tbn, ie without any loss Smile
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#7
mark007 Wrote:Ticket created here to track this problem. http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/9812

Hopefully all types of poster can be imported like movie.tbn, ie without any loss Smile

Think you need to spend more time with XBMC or read the wiki before you post bugs because this is not a bug you haven't set a thumb size so its still at its default 512

advancedsettings.xml

Code:
<thumbsize>628</thumbsize>

That gives me a thumb with a height of 768 if my posters are 1000x1500
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#8
Well a search for thumbsize in the wiki brings back 0 results, see http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Spe...size&go=Go

Just found the page using google now that it is pointed out that it exists in the Advancedsettings.xml file................... http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Adv...umbsize.3E

The fact that movie.tbn and folder.jpg are treated differently....the wiki doesn't mention that.... is that expected? Read the bug report I wrote, this is what the bug describes, the inconsistency between reading a movie.tbn and a folder.jpg.

Is there a way to stop xbmc resizing images, ie leave them as originals like the way movie.tbn currently behaves?
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#9
If your using Ember why are you using folder.jpg you can just use movie.tbn then your problem is solved

You still need to set the thumb size but no skin is going to display posters at 1000x1500 in your library so its pointless having them at that size not to mention load times will increase so your need a pretty good system to scroll through your movies at any speed
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#10
Reasons for using folder.jpg: When cleaning out multiple instances of posters / fanart, I decided on using only folder.jpg (will be switching back to movie.tbn now that I know files other than tbn are resized down so much) but skins like aeon65 display posters full screen in the information screen, so in essence shows them at 720 x 1080 which just looks so gorgeous (so a possible 3x the visible resolution to the user on 1920 x 1080 screen).

Reasons for using 1000 x 1500: Anything lower than 1000 x 1500 means youre going to have to choose one of the lower resolution versions of that poster, and don't get as good quality as possible... so arguing that higher quality fanart / posters is useless isn't really valid... someone will always benefit. If I moved to 2048 x 1536 then I could see even more benefit.........

In the past when using movie.tbn at 1000 x 1500, I have had no slowdowns at all using Core i7 920...gtx 295.... Hopefully the xbmc bug report / feature request will add an option for users to not resize jpg files also if thats what they have their posters named to.... Will benefit the higher spec machines....

The way it should work is, everyone whos looking for quality should use the highest available resolution of fanart / posters etc, and if a skin needs a smaller version of that for use in small images to be scrolled through, then it should created textures based on resized down versions of those originals, not use the full blown images as it wouldbe pointless..... That way all parts of a skin can benefit, the ones that need high resolution versions of the image, and the ones that need smaller resolution images for scrolling through... That way performance shouldn't be a problem either.

Reverting to movie.tbn for the time being anyways. Will use tbn in the future.
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#11
mark007 Wrote:Reasons for using folder.jpg: When cleaning out multiple instances of posters / fanart, I decided on using only folder.jpg

Do you mean so you can see them in windows ?

What I said is "no skin is going to display posters at 1000x1500 in your library" and they don't only movie info pulls the tbn and doesn't use a cached version but all the ones you see in your library as thumbs are cached and they will be at the default thumb size unless you change it which obviously you don't need to do as you haven't noticed there using lower quality cached one
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#12
>>X<<' Wrote:Do you mean so you can see them in windows ?

What I said is "no skin is going to display posters at 1000x1500 in your library" and they don't only movie info pulls the tbn and doesn't use a cached version but all the ones you see in your library as thumbs are cached and they will be at the default thumb size unless you change it which obviously you don't need to do as you haven't noticed there using lower quality cached one

With a largish movie library I didn't want 3 or 4 copies of the same fanart, poster and nfo file scraped by EMM, so decided one day in EMM to only use one of each (and cleaned out the others). I didn't know the jpgs would be resized by xbmc (came as a bit of a shock) so just chose folder.jpg as it sounded better than movie.tbn.... Smile

Back to tbn I guess.
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#13
But you can set emm to download only movie.tbn and fanart.jpg thats all thats needed

You still don't seem to understand that movie.tbn also get resized and cached and those are what you see in your library the exception being movie info, your Core i7 920 has never used 1000x1500 tbn its using smaller cached images except for movie info
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#14
Cool so what does movie.tbn get resized to? Definitely nothing near 512 x 512 anyways. Looks like a massive difference between it and the folder.jpg.

The debug log shows folder.jpg getting resized to 512 yes, but doesn't mention movie.tbn being resized at all......
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#15
Yes it will use 512 but its not 512x512 as it uses the aspect of the originals its in the wiki and they are no different than when using folder.jpg and I'm not talking about movie info

Look in your

\userdata\Thumbnails\Video
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