horstepipe 356 Posted December 10, 2019 Share Posted December 10, 2019 Hey I‘m wondering about the „compress artwork“ setting in Emby for Kodi. What exactly does it aim for? Is it just to save storage on low storaged devices like an 8gb Fire Stick? Or is it to increase performance as smaller files result in less computing power? Are the images being compressed on the Kodi client or does Emby server provide compressed images? OSMC ships an advandedsettings.xml by default, containing: <imageres>540</imageres> <fanartres>720</fanartres> So do these settings interfere with each other? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sualfred 677 Posted December 10, 2019 Share Posted December 10, 2019 (edited) "yes". https://kodi.wiki/view/Advancedsettings.xml#imageres All images in Kodi get cached after the first access and a copy is stored in your userdata/thumbnails folder. These cached images are shrinked to this height defintion of the advancedsettings.xml. Since Kodi's image algorythm is the worst on earth - and we are already in the 4k age - I suggest you to change both values to 1080. Edited December 10, 2019 by sualfred Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
horstepipe 356 Posted December 11, 2019 Author Share Posted December 11, 2019 Thanks, but this doesn’t answer my questions at all. I‘m primarily asking about the E4K feature to compress artwork. Does Emby for Kodi request a compressed file from Emby server or does it compress the file itself (like it is happening with the mentioned advancedsettings option)? Or in other words: will enabling this option result in a performance gain or lost? What happens on OMSC? Will the images being processed twice (Once because of the Emby for Kodi setting, once because of the advancedsettings) ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sualfred 677 Posted December 11, 2019 Share Posted December 11, 2019 (edited) Requests a compressed file. And then Kodi is compressing it again. Future calls will always use the compressed Kodi one. Just enable the artwork compressing the addon because of connection reasons (slow inet, traffic limitation, etc). Sometimes, depending on the skin and the used image control sizes, it also makes sense to enable it because the bad compressing of Kodi. 4k -> 720p in Kodi looks awful while 4k -> 1080p (by the emby server) -> 720p (kodi compressing) can look better. Just disable the compressing in the addon and change the advancedsettings stuff to 1080. It's a relict of the old Raspberry Pi 1 days. Edited December 11, 2019 by sualfred 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Angelblue05 4130 Posted December 12, 2019 Share Posted December 12, 2019 (edited) Minor correction - By default, the add-on does not compress artwork. If you enable the settings, then it will request a lesser quality (70%) from the server, this helps reduce the file size. For the actual resolution, defining it in advancedsettings.xml is the way to go. The add-on uses Kodi to cache artwork, so whatever you setup in advancedsettings will take effect. However note that if you enable this after your content has already been synced, you will want to trigger an update on all your libraries to get the artwork urls in Kodi updated with the latest settings and your artwork should get re-cached and old artwork deleted. Edited December 13, 2019 by Angelblue05 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
horstepipe 356 Posted December 13, 2019 Author Share Posted December 13, 2019 (edited) Thank you both! Hmm but when I got it right, this means OSMC processes all images by default (changes the resolution of every picture before it is saved to the thumbnails folder) because of the advancedsettings which is in a system directory not accessible via GUI. And this is not necessary, because it you want smaller images, you can enable the e4k setting... What do you think, will there be a noticeable performance increase when this values would have been removed in the advancedsettings? Any idea what to put in the advancedsettings at special://profile/ to completely disable the resolution change triggered by the advancedsettings in system directory? Maybe putting in some verrrry high values? Or will Kodi try to make the images bigger as they are? :-) Edited December 13, 2019 by horstepipe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sualfred 677 Posted December 13, 2019 Share Posted December 13, 2019 (edited) If you set it to 0 or remove it the Kodi default 1080 is used. You cannot bypass or disable the Kodi image caching behaviour. With Leia it's possible to set 1080< resolutions (9999 is max), but the default is still 1080. Set it to 9999 and the images should be cached as they are. Edited December 13, 2019 by sualfred 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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