0.2.2.0 generates 13,000 thumbnails!!!

[HappyTalk]

I have my music well organised into folders for each album which each contain a folder.jpg. Using 0.2.2.0 I scanned in all my music and then notices
d that the thumbs\music\albums now contains 13,000 jpeg images! Why are the images being duplicated? MyMusic only ever shows 15 icons per page as it is, surely any pc is fast enough to generate 15 icons on the fly using the original folder.jpg images?

Is there a way to turn off this insane thumbnail creation?

I have noticed thumbnail generation seems to pervade MediaPortal in general bloating it for negligable performance gain. MyPhotos already has thumbs.db but creates even more thumbs (1 file per image)

[chenks]

it will cache "every" thumbnail.. so you must have 13,000 albumart files on your system to begin with (be it folder.jpg or embedded in mp2 etc)

[rtv]

Originally Posted by HappyTalk

I have my music well organised into folders for each album which each contain a folder.jpg. Using 0.2.2.0 I scanned in all my music and then notices
d that the thumbs\music\albums now contains 13,000 jpeg images! Why are the images being duplicated? MyMusic only ever shows 15 icons per page as it is, surely any pc is fast enough to generate 15 icons on the fly using the original folder.jpg images?

Is there a way to turn off this insane thumbnail creation?

I have noticed thumbnail generation seems to pervade MediaPortal in general bloating it for negligable performance gain. MyPhotos already has thumbs.db but creates even more thumbs (1 file per image)

Please think about the tone you chose.. In your way I'd reply: "The well designed MP has gained performance for sure but I am insane enough not to find the hidden "use folder thumbs" config setting.

You're even two times wrong here:
The thumbs.db is a result of inappropriate Windows Explorer settings and therefore totally unrelated to MP.


If you'd like a meaningful answer instead of ranting:
- often folder.jpg aren't following the standards and are extremely large
- MP only needs thumbs of 2 certain sizes
- very often people have their music collections on extra drives, external (even low bandwidth USB) drives or network shares / storage. Access to those folder.jpg was slowing down MP considerably
- 99% of the music users have to live with NTFS - this doesn't feature dancing b-trees or similar directory indexing functions to speed up accesses to thousands of deep subdirectories.
- some people consider faster storage (even ramdrives) to speed up daily used features
- all thumbs can easily be relocated thanks to the new service provider

nuff said

[rtv]

Oh, btw: Even if you like to switch this off to safe 50-100 MB of extremely valueable space on your Hard disk you just make me laugh reading this:

Originally Posted by HappyTalk

I DO have a lot of records 6k videos, 43k music so for me it was a must.

[zombiepig]

Originally Posted by HappyTalk

I have noticed thumbnail generation seems to pervade MediaPortal in general bloating it for negligable performance gain.

Just wanna add that for me these cached thumbnails have increased the speed of thumbnail browsing by a magnitude of 100s (if not 1000s!!!!). Before thumbnail caching mp would chugg along whenever it hit a large folder.jpg (some of mine are >1000x1000px), but now it's silky smooooth

[HappyTalk]

Apologies for tone, I got really frustrated after trying out new tv server and then seeing over 13,000 thumbs! after doing the music db import I just thought bloat and wondered where it was all going. I don't know where all the thumbs came from in my case (< 2000 folder.jpg's exist I just checked)? Maybe a lot of the mp3's have embedded artwork or something, though 'use embedded artwork for thumbs' was set to off before import so still unsure why so many?

Re " hidden "use folder thumbs" config setting" I presume you mean
Setup|Music Database|Use folder .jpg to create thumbs
I had set this on and option below 'create artist....first file'=off before doing import thinking this would avoid the thumb generation, that I had seen in the past in Thumbs\Pictures but not in Thumbs\music which until 0.2.2.0 had remained blank.



OK on looking at the thumbs generated I realise there are in fact closer to 18,000 as there are in fact another 5,000 in Thumbs\Music\Folder.

I see that the huge number in the Albums thumb folder comes about because a unique thumb is generated for every artist on a compilation album so a compilation album with say 40 tracks all by different artists will create 40 identical large and 40 identical small icons, I presume this is not the intended result? I understand why you use thumbs and am not knocking the concept, it's a good idea but the duplication seems unneccessary. I would have thought a db field pointing to the thumb filename would ensure both Albums and Folder could use the same thumb and compilation albums could all point to the same single thumb for every track on the album.

I can see you may not want to have to key off the db to locate which thumb to use for folders though (as user may be in shares view not using the db but still want thumbnail caching), so would have thought Folder might contain thumbs named based on the path substituting dot for slash
e.g '...\thumbs\music\folder\d.mp3.a.air.moon safari.jpg'

For albums you would have to access the db anyway to know what albums there are. I guess you used artist-album for uniqueness which causes compilations to generate lots of files and might not be unique anyway. Looking at the db I figure album.StrAlbum + '.' + album.idAlbum
e.g '...\thumbs\music\albums\Now Music 69.1020.jpg '
would be unique + by prefixing with real album name adds the human readable format and is easily tracked for future deletion.

One last thing is on a Hidef 1080i LCD is 300x300 (large thumb res) enough resolution when in filmstrip mode or does this just access the original jpg? I presume 300x300 is enough for the large icon view on such a hidef setup? Hmmm I just tried setting to 'album view' in filmstrip mode and nothing appears in the large filmstrip box, it does work in shares view though

Sorry again for earlier tone, now trying to resolve issue.

[HappyTalk]

Originally Posted by rtv

you just make me laugh reading this:

Dunno why you're laughing. I prompted you to add indexes to the Music Db to speed it up in the first place. I appreciate you're the guy doing all the hard work coding so know I have to respect that when I'm not doing anything. But as described in prev post I don't think the implementation of thumbs is very efficient, hence my initial shock at 18k thumbs. It's not the disk space just the inefficiency + even with NTFS 13,000 (small) files suddenly appearing in one folder was a bit worrying. But fair enough I realise I need to either code my own plugin or accept it as is.

[rtv]

Originally Posted by HappyTalk

Maybe a lot of the mp3's have embedded artwork or something, though 'use embedded artwork for thumbs' was set to off before import so still unsure why so many?

That's a tradeoff to please the greatest share of users.
Just comment out line 2921 - 2936 in Database.cs to avoid creation of those album thumbs.

Originally Posted by HappyTalk

I would have thought a db field pointing to the thumb filename would ensure both Albums and Folder could use the same thumb

Sure but DB lookup are much slower than .NET's file.exists() check... In addition SQLite is not really threadsafe and it would be a pain to "wait" for the thumb wouldn't it?

Originally Posted by HappyTalk

So would have thought Folder might contain thumbs named based on the path substituting dot for slash
e.g '...\thumbs\music\folder\d.mp3.a.air.moon safari.jpg'

They are named based on the Path - just not using the full name but the CRC hash value of it.

Originally Posted by HappyTalk

For albums you would have to access the db anyway to know what albums there are.

True - therefore I preferred duplicate thumbs of 4-40 KB over slowness. I did consider something similar for naming, too but that would have broken backward compatibility for users who already had good album thumbs for no gain.

Originally Posted by HappyTalk

One last thing is on a Hidef 1080i LCD is 300x300 (large thumb res) enough resolution when in filmstrip mode or does this just access the original jpg? I presume 300x300 is enough for the large icon view on such a hidef setup?

Did you see the General options --> Thumbnails config section?
Currently Bav and me are considering to clean out and unify the used icon and image properties of listcontrols. In the end it will be similar like in MyPictures - large thumb for filmstrip and albumview only, the rest = small thumbs.

btw: the "standard" size of those thumbs for Windows is 64x64 which is really looking awful

[idioteque]

great support RTV !!!

[jdivic]

hello to all,

First I apologize if I'm slightly off the topic… my problem are thumbs for recorded shows… it seems that MP's try to generate icons for recorded shows never ends and keeps memory allocated effectively producing memory leak… about 15MB for every entry in recorded TV shows… so… is there a way to tell MP not to try generate thumbs for recorded tv shows… or can someone point me what in code should be commented to disable this feature… please…