Technical question: what's native art size in TMS 5 database

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Briain
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Technical question: what's native art size in TMS 5 database

Post by Briain » Thu Mar 19, 2009 11:56 am

Hi

Someone asked me the below question and it's raised something I had meant to ask ages ago but had not yet got round to doing. Below is the question and my response; does anyone know if my assumptions are correct (see two one-line questions at end)?

Just as a matter of interest: Does your coverart work properly? I think there is a bug as all coverart looks pretty low-res and ugly as compared to version 4.

In version 4 there used to be an option to deactivate coverart rescaling. This option seems to have disappared...
My respoonse (and questions at the end for people here):

This is a small question with potentially a large open-ended answer!

With SqueezeCenter, you could select to resize or resample art (better quality). Doing a scan took 3 hours using resize or 10 hours if you selected to resample the art instead.

With Twonky 4, my understanding is that the art was natively stored at 160x160 pixels, so I figured that to optimise the quality, I’d be better using Paint Shop Pro to manually resample all my art and store it as 160x160 pixel Folder.jpg’s. It’s interesting to note that some people have told me that a TMS4 rescan is quick but a rebuild takes hours. On my system, TMS4 rebuilds and rescans take similar times (both are about 15~20 minutes; I’ve never actually timed them exactly) so my guess is that it simply copies them into the database directly which is why the rebuild is so fast (I’m just guessing here as I don’t know the mechanics of the TMS4 database).

The question I have been meaning to ask for ages is, how does TMS5 handle art? I note that there are a couple of references to the database properties as below:

pv:albumArtOffset Offset to album art - if there / for pictures used for thumbnails!
pv:albumArtResolution XxY resolution of the albumArt in pixels (typically image item or video item).


I’d guess the bottom one might be something you’d use to set the resolution of displayed art, but I don’t know what the native resolution of the actual system is (i.e. what the scan stores it as). I’ll set up the PC version again and scan a bunch of different sized images then see if the stored art is visible or not in the database files. My guess is that it might be 160x160 since that is what it was before, and since all my art looks identical to how it did using TMS4. The implications from your art looking degraded are that TMS5 resizes (as opposed to resample) art and that TMS4 reamples art, but that’s just a guess.

If my suspicions are correct, what I don’t know is if this can be changed by a setting in one of the configuration files but it might be worth having a spin through the PC one to see if anything leaps out at us.

Does anyone here know the optimum art size for TMS5 (i.e. what native resolution it stores art as)?
Does anyone know if TMS5 resizes or resamples art (and is there a switch in a conf file to select either option)?


Bri

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