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Cover Art plugin


hstamas

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blgentry

You think my complaint about the Android app being soft is somehow related to scaling or stretching?  I don't understand your reasoning.  The web app is sharp.  The AndroidTV app is sharp.  It's only the normal Android app that is soft.

 

Brian.

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35 minutes ago, blgentry said:

You think my complaint about the Android app being soft is somehow related to scaling or stretching?  I don't understand your reasoning.  The web app is sharp.  The AndroidTV app is sharp.  It's only the normal Android app that is soft.

 

Brian.

I'm saying that the type of client side scaling that would be involved would blur the images to some degree.

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10 hours ago, blgentry said:

I'm advocating for scaling and cropping an image rather than a non-proportional stretch.  What do you think of that?

 

Thanks,

Brian.

That could lead to your cover art treatments getting chopped.

However, when Cover Art is not present, there are cases where this might produce a better result.

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blgentry
8 hours ago, roaku said:

I'm saying that the type of client side scaling that would be involved would blur the images to some degree.

They are already being stretched, which is a non proportional scale.  Any softness caused by this is already present because they are being scaled already.

 

Brian.

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blgentry
3 hours ago, Luke said:

That could lead to your cover art treatments getting chopped.

 

If an image that is not 2:3 gets scaled a cropped, that seems preferable to distortion of the aspect ratio.  But you said "treatment".  Are you trying to say that that the "case" added by the cover art plugin would be cropped in some way?

 

Are you advocating that non proportional scaling is a superior method?  I'm having trouble figuring out what you are saying.

 

Thanks,

Brian.

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WildWayz

Sorry to hijack this - does this plugin add load to the server or is it just an overlay? For example, if it is a large library, will it impact performance?

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4 hours ago, WildWayz said:

Sorry to hijack this - does this plugin add load to the server or is it just an overlay? For example, if it is a large library, will it impact performance?

Hi, it adds image processing on the fly to images displayed in Emby apps, so yes, it will come with some additional resource consumption on the server.

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WildWayz2001
11 minutes ago, Luke said:

Hi, it adds image processing on the fly to images displayed in Emby apps, so yes, it will come with some additional resource consumption on the server.

Is it generated on the fly or as a process? I mean, if I have a NAS with 1000 movies and 2000 episodes, does it have to apply the overlay to each one or is it literally just as the page is rendered?

Thanks :)

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33 minutes ago, WildWayz2001 said:

Is it generated on the fly or as a process? I mean, if I have a NAS with 1000 movies and 2000 episodes, does it have to apply the overlay to each one or is it literally just as the page is rendered?

Thanks :)

HI, it's all on the fly.

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On 10/10/2023 at 5:42 AM, blgentry said:

Are you trying to say that that the "case" added by the cover art plugin would be cropped in some way?

Yes because, to the app, it is just an image.  It doesn't know there is "extra stuff" around the real image.  So, that would not work at all.

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blgentry
4 minutes ago, ebr said:

Yes because, to the app, it is just an image.  It doesn't know there is "extra stuff" around the real image.  So, that would not work at all.

I'm confused.  You know the aspect ratio and size of the original cover.  You know the dimensions of the case treatment.  So you know what the final composite image dimensions are.  You know your target aspect ratio.  Your composite images should not be cropped or resized at all. 

 

Are you saying that all of the cover art composite images just tack on the top and bottom, which produces the wrong aspect ratio by definition?

 

Brian.

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4 minutes ago, blgentry said:

 You know the aspect ratio and size of the original cover.  You know the dimensions of the case treatment.  So you know what the final composite image dimensions are.  You know your target aspect ratio.  

There is no one piece of the system that has all of that knowledge. 

The app just requests images and all it knows is the size (and, thereby shape) of that image. It doesn't know where the image came from, what created it, how it was created or what the image contains.  Then, add to that, that it is actually getting multiple images with what could be multiple shapes and it has to decide how best to show all of that in a uniform way.

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11 minutes ago, blgentry said:

Are you saying that all of the cover art composite images just tack on the top and bottom, which produces the wrong aspect ratio by definition?

No, CoverArt "fits" the original image into another image we call a "treatment".  Each of those different treatments has a particular spot within it where the original image goes but the ultimate image could have a radically different shape than the original depending on what the treatment is doing (e.g. putting it inside an old CD case or a DVD box and then rotating that to be 3D).

How it fits the original into the treatment is defined by the option of whether to keep the shape of the treatment and squeeze the original into the space or keep the aspect of the original image and distort the treatment around it.  But, after that, the app or whatever display layer there is, can decide to further alter the presentation of the resulting image.

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blgentry
40 minutes ago, ebr said:

There is no one piece of the system that has all of that knowledge. 

What knowledge is missing?  CoverArt (plugin) knows all of that with the possible exception of the aspect ratio of the client.  But you wrote all of the clients, so you know the target aspect ratio, which should be the same on all of them.  

 

Brian.

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Sorry, I'm not following what you are saying but I explained exactly how it works in the post above.

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24 minutes ago, blgentry said:

I guess I'll just leave this be.

 

Brian.

The way we did it was so that CoverArt could make any changes to the images that it wants on the fly, and the client apps would have to be able to just deal with them without having to know exactly what they are.

This was the ideal, but in practice has been difficult with some of the treatments. To solve this, we either have to make the client apps more aware of the transformations so that they can make better decisions, or leave it in the hands of the user by adding come client-side options.

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Taking CA out of the equation, scale and crop is not always going to be a better solution than a slight distortion.  Without some sort of AI to understand the exact contents of the image, I don't know how a "perfect" answer could be found in some of these cases.

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blgentry

It's unlikely that continued discussion will change my opinion that stretching is always wrong.  Conversely I do not seem to be able to convince anyone here of that opinion as the team seems to think that distortion is just fine.  I'm no longer pursuing this topic because the team seems to disagree with my suggestion at a fundamental level.  

 

I really do love your product overall.  I'll agree to disagree on this particular subject.

 

Take care,

Brian.

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crusher11

The biggest problem is that even if every poster has the same treatment, therefore they're all the same size, the apps still scale them because they're not quite the 2:3 aspect ratio it expects. 

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2 hours ago, hstamas said:

Was the fact that this plugin doesn’t work at all on Apple silicon Mac’s ever get resolved?

Hi, we’re hoping to have this resolved as part of the 4.8 release. Thanks.

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  • 1 month later...
Killface69
On 10/9/2023 at 11:20 PM, roaku said:

I think that might lead to more of these complaints:

 

I'm a graphics designer and I think the current display hurts. Never stretch an image, especially people's faces.

I'd strongly suggest cropping.

Edited by Killface69
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17 hours ago, Killface69 said:

I'd strongly suggest cropping.

Hi.  Please see above on why that won't work with many of the CA treatments.

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