[ervine]

I am watching my pictures from a remote drive (samba on a FreeBSD fileserver) using XBMC. Everytime the thumbnails get generated, and because of it being over SMB, it takes a while, especially with folders with a large amount of files. Is there a way to speed this up? Is it for example possible to:

- Store the thumbnails on the local XBMC drive
- Save the generated thumbnails, instead of generating them everytime you visit a folder?

Thanks in advance,
Erwin

[jmarshall]

They're always stored locally, and ofcourse we only generate those that aren't already stored.

[ric4rd0]

They're always stored locally, and ofcourse we only generate those that aren't already stored.

I'm not sure about this. the settings in XBMC show that picture thumbnails should be stored localy but my xbmc live 10/dharma (installed on harddrive) always generates thumbnails from scratch. i've never had problems with this on my old XBMC on XBOX but on my PC thumbnails are only stored on folders view - small 4 thumbnails on folder icon. a hardrive in my pc always going mad when opening a folder with more than 10 images in it.
well they may be stored localy because there's lots of folders/data in path /home/user/xbmc/userdata/thumbnails/ but somehow xbmc still ganerates them everytime.

[jmarshall]

No it doesn't. This will be clear in the debug log.

Note that it DOES fetch picture tag information each session (not per listing).

[tboooe]

perhaps trying dds will help?

[ric4rd0]

No it doesn't. This will be clear in the debug log.

Note that it DOES fetch picture tag information each session (not per listing).

I'm not sure I get it fully.
In the picture view mode when I open any folder xbmx always starts creating thumbnails no matter how many times I've opened the folder/viewed images in it before. It also starts re-creating thumbnails when returning from full screen image view back to the folder view even though all thumbnails have already been created before I switched to full screen image view.

perhaps trying dds will help?

What is dds?

[ric4rd0]

okay, so here's the logfile:

http://pastebin.com/v932T9GN

I can only guess how much info related to the problem you can read from it but just in case here is what I did after switching logging on (my apologies for the dumb what-I-did explanation) :

18:40:XX system starting

18:42:XX logging turned on, then:

PICTURES -> choose folder -> open folder with images (thumbnails creating) -> few images viewed -> back to folder view (thumbnails creating) -> few images viewed -> back to folder view (thumbnails creating) -> jumped to main screen -> system...to turn logging off

[jmarshall]

The log shows no thumbs being cached at all.

My guess is your confusing "the thumbs of each picture load one at a time in the listing" with "the thumbnails are being cached".

How long is it taking to load each thumb in the listing?

Cheers
Jonathan

[ric4rd0]

The log shows no thumbs being cached at all.

My guess is your confusing "the thumbs of each picture load one at a time in the listing" with "the thumbnails are being cached".

How long is it taking to load each thumb in the listing?

Cheers
Jonathan

Hi Jonathan, well to be honest I can only guess how long is it taking as it looks like it is not loading thumbnails at all just creating them everytime each folder is either opened for listing or when returning to listing from full screen view. So I guess it's taking from a quater of a second to one second to create or load any of the thumbs. Yesterday when I finished logging I used the Midnight Commander to search through all of the cached files (every single one of them (0,1,2,...everything) to see if the date/time of file creation or changes matches the time I accessed pictures but all the cached files were old, non of them updated. But maybe it's just because I have not put any new image(s)/folder(s) into PICTURES main directory.

I was also thinking that this might be caused by the fact that I have two harddrives in my PC, the main with system and the other where pictures are stored. (I "connected" the second hardrive using fstab (/dev/sdb1 /home/r/d250 ext3 defaults,users 0 0)
But it's not what causes it for sure because this issue with thumbnails appeared even when I was testing XBMC with one drive only (I did a pure installation after that)

What I'm going to do is:

- to put a new picture files/folders among the old ones and see if any new cache file(s) is(are) created

- to put different size pictures to see if thumbnail generating takes longer for bigger images and shorter time for smaller ones

- to compare it with the old XBMC for XBOX (not sure if this can tell anything since the core of XBMC might have changed, but still it's Linux based system)

If you want me to try anything else just tell me.

Thank you.

Richard

[ric4rd0]

My guess is your confusing "the thumbs of each picture load one at a time in the listing" with "the thumbnails are being cached".

Sorry for my bad english. What I meant by this is just that my xbmc is creating thumbnails everytime in the directory listing. It doesn't seem that any picture thumbnail is read from cache it is always creating them.

UPDATE: I put fresh pictures and after opening them for both dir listing and full screen view I searched through all of the cache folders /home/r/.xbmc/userdata/Thumbnails/ and found thumbnails created from newly put pictures, so they get created after all but not read back.
I used stopwatch to find out how long does it take to create/show all of the thumbnails in the current directory. It's taking exactly the same amout of time whether it's creating thumbnails for the first time or returning to directory listing anytime later.

[zetk]

Probably the same problem here. I have been thinking that this is normal but recently a friend of mine showed me some photos from vacation and I was quite surprised how fast thumbnails were shown on his XBMC running under Windows XP. They just appeared, no slow loading like on mine Ubuntu system.

[ric4rd0]

I don't mean to be rude but it looks to me as this picture thumbnail issue is a bug in XBMC LIVE. I've tried a fresh instalation on three different computers and it always did the same - no picture thumbnails fetched in directory listing. It's creating thumbnails in every directory listing over and over again, no matter how many times I've opened the directory. I am a bit concerned about that this issue also puts hardrive into an unusual heavy load each time. Like I said it's not just one particular computer.
Well one can always turn the thumbnails feature off. But in bigger amount of pictures it is very difficult to navigate.

What I was able to read out from mine and my friends debug log is this:

WORKING PICTURE THUMBNAILS FEATURE (Ubuntu 10+XBMC)

DEBUG: Caching image '/home/larry/data/sdb1/photos/my_car/P3260083.JPG' as 'a/a3c77cf6.JPG' thumb size
INFO: Caching image from: /home/larry/data/sdb1/photos/my_car/P3260083.JPG to special://masterprofile/Thumbnails/a/a3c77cf6.JPG with width 512 and height 512


NOT WORKING PICTURE THUMBNAILS on mine system (XBMC LIVE 10 Dharma)
instead of all those "Caching image" and "Caching image from:" I only get these:
DEBUG: Thread 2894068592 terminating

Another try to do something about it was deleting /home/user/.xbmc/userdata but it neither helped

As I wrote in my previous posts:
Thumbnails are normaly created under /home/user/.xbmc/userdata/Thumbnails/
they are just not read back when needed.

Using "ddsfanart" made only this worse, it takes longer to show all the thumbnails and of course it was re-creating thumbnails in directory listing over and over again.

Please, isn't there really any chance for some workaround?

[Japaja]

My guess is your confusing "the thumbs of each picture load one at a time in the listing" with "the thumbnails are being cached".

OK, but when they do load in the listing why do they have to "reload" all the time?

Please look at this scenario.
I add a folder to library. It takes around 2min to cache it (900 images). That part is fine. Then I go back and enter the folder a second time, this time images are loading from cache. I move to last image and it takes almost 30sec or longer for it to catch up and show the thumbnail.

It seems not to be giving priority to selected image, but rather generating/loading them in order from top to bottom. Now the worst part is if I open that last image to view it and press back I have to wait 30sec or longer to see the thumbs again. It also happens if screensaver activates or I move to sub-directory and back which might be for memory reasons, but for it to happen every time I view one image makes it unusable.

[NativeCanadian]

Did you have any luck with this? I know you are using the word thumbnails wrong, but I know what you mean, that when you browse a folder, the may thumbs take a while to cache to give you folder views, BUT when you go into the folder with the pics (your reall problem), the thumbnail render view takes forever, and you are sitting there waiting so you can brose pics using the thumbnail VIEW, and even switching picks is not as snappy as you want.. any fix you found.?

I don't mean to be rude but it looks to me as this picture thumbnail issue is a bug in XBMC LIVE. I've tried a fresh instalation on three different computers and it always did the same - no picture thumbnails fetched in directory listing. It's creating thumbnails in every directory listing over and over again, no matter how many times I've opened the directory. I am a bit concerned about that this issue also puts hardrive into an unusual heavy load each time. Like I said it's not just one particular computer.
Well one can always turn the thumbnails feature off. But in bigger amount of pictures it is very difficult to navigate.

What I was able to read out from mine and my friends debug log is this:

WORKING PICTURE THUMBNAILS FEATURE (Ubuntu 10+XBMC)

DEBUG: Caching image '/home/larry/data/sdb1/photos/my_car/P3260083.JPG' as 'a/a3c77cf6.JPG' thumb size
INFO: Caching image from: /home/larry/data/sdb1/photos/my_car/P3260083.JPG to special://masterprofile/Thumbnails/a/a3c77cf6.JPG with width 512 and height 512


NOT WORKING PICTURE THUMBNAILS on mine system (XBMC LIVE 10 Dharma)
instead of all those "Caching image" and "Caching image from:" I only get these:
DEBUG: Thread 2894068592 terminating

Another try to do something about it was deleting /home/user/.xbmc/userdata but it neither helped

As I wrote in my previous posts:
Thumbnails are normaly created under /home/user/.xbmc/userdata/Thumbnails/
they are just not read back when needed.

Using "ddsfanart" made only this worse, it takes longer to show all the thumbnails and of course it was re-creating thumbnails in directory listing over and over again.

Please, isn't there really any chance for some workaround?

[dgsgc]

Anyone get anywhere with this?

Im getting the same, the cache part is working fine, its just taking ages to reload the cached images.

Is there anyway to reduce the size of the cached images to maybe speed it up?