Thumbnail Questions Options

[bb80301]

First -- thanks to everyone involved in making and improving XBMC....

A couple of questions re: thumbnails:

1) Is there a limit to how many thumbnails can be stored in cache? I have about 4,100 entries in my music cache and about 1,000 others in video & photos. I seem to have hit a wall -- no new music thumbs will store, but if I delete some of the cached files, it will start storing them again -- but then it stops again (until I delete some more).

2) My covers are called cover.jpg. I've put the following entries into AdvancedSettings.xml:

<musicthumbs><add>cover.jpg</add>
</musicthumbs>
<dvdthumbs><add>cover.jpg</add>
</dvdthumbs>

For music, this works as expected. However for videos & DVD's, I need to have my cover art named folder.jpg for it to recognize (ie the setting to add cover.jpg doesn't take).

As a workaround, I've just renamed all of my video covers folder.jpg -- but I am curious why I'm not able to get it to work correctly.

Thanks for any help that anyone can offer -- particularly a fix or workaround for my cache limit issue.

bb

[bb80301]

Further to the above, I checked my xbmc.log.

This is what I get if I browse a part of my disk where thumbnails haven't yet been created:

...
16:11:44 M: 45527040 NOTICE: initialize done
16:11:44 M: 44474368 NOTICE: Running the application...
16:11:45 M: 33759232 NOTICE: Display resolution AUTO : NTSC 4:3 (4)
16:11:45 M: 31657984 NOTICE: start timeserver client
16:11:45 M: 30916608 NOTICE: XBFileZilla: Starting...
16:11:49 M: 29204480 NOTICE: XBFileZilla: Started
16:11:49 M: 29163520 NOTICE: HDD: SMART is supported.
16:11:49 M: 29233152 NOTICE: HDD: SMART is enabled.
16:12:06 M: 36859904 NOTICE: Saving Standard settings in T:\avpacksettings.xml
18:05:57 M: 41398272 ERROR: PICTURE::DoCreateThumbnail: Unable to create thumbfile q:\userdata\Thumbnails\Music\520ca4b9.tbn from image smb://BBOFFICE/WD300 (K)/Music/U-V/Van Halen/The Best of Both Worlds/cover.jpg
...

Note: I'm using file mode & use my directories to organize my music rather than the library.

After some more experimenting, it doesn't seem like I'm limited at this point on my video thumbnails -- just music. When I browse to XBMC\Userdata\Thumbnails\Music, it tells me that I have 4096 objects in the directory -- which is a clue that it has something to do with a limit because 4096 is a power of 2 (i.e. 4K).

Thanks for any help any of you can offer.

BB

This post has been edited by bb80301: Apr 10 2007, 12:49 AM

[bb80301]

OK -- continuing to try to answer my own question -- but still stumped.

When I try to add another test file that that directory (\XBMC\Thumbnails\Music\), I get an error from my FTP client -- so I know have figured out that the file system doesn't allow any more than 4096 entries (the \artists subdirectory + 4095 thumbnail files). I am allowed to put new files into the \artists subdirectory - for what it's worth.

So now, I have a more specific question -- is there a workaround so that some of my music thumbnails can be stored in a different directory or subdirectory of \XBMC\Thumbnails\Music\?

Thanks once again for any help.

BB

[jmarshall]

No, there is no workaround available, save hacking the source.

4096 albums sounds like quite a few - One presumes you have quite a few various artists albums and store them as <Artist>/<Album> regardless of whether they're various artists?

Cheers,
Jonathan

[bb80301]

No, there is no workaround available, save hacking the source.

4096 albums sounds like quite a few - One presumes you have quite a few various artists albums and store them as <Artist>/<Album> regardless of whether they're various artists?

Cheers,
Jonathan

Thanks, Jonathan. I have ~5,000 "albums" on my music server (~500GB). Most of them are live shows (from taper friendly bands) that I've traded and collected over the years. Generally, the tapers or someone else along the way have created cover art for the shows. In other cases, I've created the cover art myself.

As I've researched this issue, I've found that some people w/ large numbers of MAME ROMs have been able to work around the 4,096 limit by putting them onto a networked drive.

Would it be possible to somehow redirect my thumbnails to reside on my music server's drive? I realize that this is not optimal, as having them reside locally would be faster -- but when I'm browsing music, the drive is already active and spinning so the hit might not be too bad.

I'm a bit over my head on this, but it seems like this could be done either by redirecting the OS to point to a cache directory on my network drive when it wants files from e:\XBMC\Userdata\Thumbnails\Music or, alternatively, have an option in XBMC to specify an alternate directory.

Further thoughts, anyone??

Thanks for any help
BB

[jmarshall]

No, that is not possible.

The texturemanager can only load from the xbox disk. And it'd be a hell of a lot slower.

Your only option is to hack the source to use more than one folder.

[bb80301]

Jonathan

I just wanted to express my appreciation for the changes that you recently made (splitting music thumbs over many folders to address the 4,096 limit). You (and the rest of the XBMC team) absolutely rock!

BB