Images in SWRemote directory

[Richard Naninck]

Scott,

I see that the images in the SWRemote directory are refreshed any time they are displayed in the theme. Does that mean that the images are actually overwritten every time the images get displayed in the theme?

The reason I ask is this: I figured that the SWRemote would be faster in displaying images the second time a same image was displayed because it was already loaded in the SWRemotes\Images directory. That's why I disabled the "Delete image control temporary files on startup" in the config menu of the SWRemote.

Now that I see the images seem to be overwritten any time they get displayed, I guess I better clean the temporary directory again upon startup of the SWRemote by enabling this option again. I restart the SWRemote every early morning with a task to prevent it from getting slow (long standing issue in my setup).

Tip: If you are displaying coverart from movies or cd's, resize them or atleast make them smaller in memory. The SWRemote truely does respond quicker when images are smaller. I noticed that it took a while to display certain panels and saw that they were filled with 2MB+ coverart images. After rescaling the coverart the filesize shrunk to below 100KB and the panel was way faster than before.

[ScottBot]

Richard,

If you are referring to dynamic images, then what you are saying is right. If an image changes, it is sent to the remote. I realize that this may seem like a waste, but it's possible that the image will change but keep the same filename. I'm sure this could be improved to do a crc check or something to skip the download. If the image is the same, you shouldn't notice anything, since the new image looks like the old.

Images can definitely be a performance issue with the remotes. Making them as small (by reducing color depth, size, and transparency) will help performance. Especially on slower CPUs.

[Richard Naninck]

I remember the time where we debugged the refresh of dynamic images and you had to include the complete path to the filename because all of my music coverart is called folder.jpg and it didn't refresh on remote SWRemotes. I just never figured that they would refresh all the time. Maybe a good feature request to do that crc check. Not sure if that is even quicker when the file itself is very small, but probably would be a lot quicker with bigger files. It would make the SWRemote more agile.

Anyways, nice to know! Thnx