Picture viewer and thumbnail generation
#16
dgsgc Wrote: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?

Hi guys, still not solved. I think XBMC developers should know about the problem, because it appears even on Windows XBMC and on XBMC installed over UBUNTU 10.x, so it's not just the XBMC Live issue.

Basicly picture thumbnails are generated over and over again. Well maybe not generated but 200+ images in a directory causes directory listing freeze the computer for several minutes each and everytime.

a tipical scenario:

main menu -> pictures -> vacation2010 (480 images, 5Mpix)
freeze for 3 minutes
thumbnails show up
selected one image to view on fullscreen
image shows on full screen
pressed ESC key to return from full screen to directory
freeze for 3 minutes
thumbnails show up
now I can finally either choose another image or go to parent directory
ok - go to parent directory
go back to vacation2010
freeze for 3 minutes
.........

the only solution is to turn off thumbnail generating completely.

A friend of mine runs XBMC 10 on old UBUNTU 9 and it works as it should for him. 370 high-res images in a directory - thumbnails appear in less than 1 second.

It also works like charm on my old xbox

Ive also created a ticket on trac.xbmc - http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/11330 but no reply
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#17
Yeah, still the same issue here - looks like the picture thumbnail database is not working at all. Probably a bug in xbmc SQL - sqlite scripting. Recently I switched to UBUNTU 11 with XBMC. As for thumbnails for pictures it did not solve anything - to keep my hard-drive "healthy" I had to turn the picture thumbnails feature completely off.

I wonder if developers are planing to have a look at it.
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#18
Hi,

I am having the same problem. I have finally cleared the userdata\thumbnails in my portabledata-directory, and now I do not get any thumbnails of pictures anymore, only black icons with no content.

Before that, O had the problem that the cached images were recreated each time I entered a folder.

This is really weird, maybe it is related to storing portabledata instead of storing in the Appdata path?

One more thing: after I deleted all the thumbnails from the cache, and entering XBMC again, I noticed that some of the thumbnials of the images I viewed were regenerated automatically, but XBMC does not display them at all in the thumbnailview.
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#19
Thank you people for your responses. All the issues you described are the same I have so I see it's not just me...

Jackie78 Wrote:This is really weird, maybe it is related to storing portabledata instead of storing in the Appdata path?

Well I don't think this is what causes it as the problem is completely the same on Linux based systems - I'm guessing you run it under Windows. Linux stores these data somewhere else though quite similary. It still seems to me as if the thumbnail-cache-creating feature works correctly (but all of the time over and over) but show-thumbnails-when-needed feature does not. Anyway if it is what causes it or not it's nothing we as the users can do about it.

Don't get me wrong, I love XBMC. Movie playback with stunning library feature, lower system requirements plus other features make it #1 Media centre system for me.

I'm going to contact someone from developer's team to offer some money for helping with this. As I've been using XBMC for approx 7 years now I wanted to contribute with some amount of money anyway so this might be the right moment.
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#20
Hi ric4rd0,

thanks for your answer, anothe rpoint I noticed: I have tons of photos on my networkshare, which is added as a sourcefolder like "\\MyServer\MyShare\MyFotos\2011_10_10\..." etc. Well, in some(!) of these folders, the thumbnails are displayed, in others, only some of the pictures inside the folders have thumbnails, where others don't (black thumbnail displayed, not the default palceholder), and in some folders, all thumbnails are black.

And additionally: when I disable automatic thumbnail generation in the options dialog, I get a placeholder instead of the black thumbnail. When I then select "show thubnails", the thumbnails are read from the pictures directly (at least thats how it appears to me), and they are displayed for that folder.

But of course, what I want is:

- automatically create thumbnails when entering a new folder
- make use of cached thumbnails.

Please developers, this problem seems so common to me, I have seen it appear on so many systems, can you please try to reproduce and fix this? Thanks.
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#21
Jackie78 Wrote:when I disable automatic thumbnail generation in the options dialog, I get a placeholder instead of the black thumbnail. When I then select "show thubnails", the thumbnails are read from the pictures directly (at least thats how it appears to me), and they are displayed for that folder.

Hi Jackie78, thanks for the tip, I will try it out. It's not the sollution but it's better than nothing.

At the moment I'm installing an old UBUNTU 9.10. to see if this helps. On this old version thumbnails works like charm for my friend.
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#22
Finished testing but witnout any change. The friend of mine got somehow lucky that it works for him but the the same doesn't work for me. And that trick to turn off the thumbnails and turn back on did not work either Sad
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#23
Same problem here. On My old XBOX it works super fast, but with XBMC Live I have to wait ages to load the thumbnails over and over again. I'm using a very fast Buffalo NAS server.
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#24
just to add more about this bug:

it seems that thumbnails are read from cache after all, but in extremely slow way.
I tested thumbnails behaviour on pictures stored on a network share. After first thumbnail creation and re-entering the folder thumbnails were read from internal hard-drive, not re-created from network share. I was easily able to see that there was not any network activity (network switch ports were not blinking) while the hard drive was fetching the thumbnails (hard drive led diode was lid for several seconds) It read pictures from network only when I chose full screen view mode.
BUT (!) reading thumbnails from harddrive was so slow as if they were being made (re-made) and then read back. This theory supports a fact that hard drive is always very busy everytime when showing thumbnails. Reading such small files (thumbnails) with size from aprox. 30-120kB cannot make any hard drive so busy.
Or the thumbnail database reading algorythm is not optimised and makes reading them so slow. Another proof of this theory is that I can see thumbnails created under /home/<user>/.xbmc/userdata/Thumbnails/
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#25
Is there any developer working on this nasty bug?
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#26
athloni Wrote:Is there any developer working on this nasty bug?

I don't know. I have not heard a word from them even I put a ticket to a place where such things should be reported - it's here:

http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/11330

but no response. Well maybe there won't be any response and in the next version of XMBC this will be fixed. But in the meantime I have to use two systems on my HTPC - XBMC for films/tvshows and Windows 7 for pictures :mad:
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#27
Haha, sorry but I must laugh. I 've had this problem for almost three years and always thought that this was just some bug in the old XMBC for desktop PCs. So I thought that after an update this will be fixed. As I've had two drives in my PC I kept Windows for photo's viewing too. So you're not the only one, there are people who solves this the same but quite stupid way too.
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#28
zetk Wrote:Haha, sorry but I must laugh. I 've had this problem for almost three years and always thought that this was just some bug in the old XBMC for desktop PCs. So I thought that after an update this will be fixed. As I've had two drives in my PC I kept Windows for photo's viewing too. So you're not the only one, there are people who solves this the same but quite stupid way too.

Hi! Good to know that Smile but still a sad situation.
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#29
Strange thing that there is still no solution
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#30
why? team-xbmc has never showed interest and there are no patches....
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