Thumbnails slow on 6.4.3

[dflachbart]

I finally got around installing 6.4.3, and ran into an issue that puzzles me (since I haven't seen any other post about it here...). All thumbnails, including video, music cover art, and photos, now take 3-5 seconds to appear (during that time these ugly placeholder icons get displayed). Also, when playing FLAC files, it takes a few seconds before the next song starts. I checked the logs, and there is no trace of anything weird going on. This happens on the desktop client as well as on Placeshifter or HD-100.

In 6.3.x the thumbnails always appeared instantaneously. I just reverted the server back to 6.3.10, and now they are as speedy as ever. And yes, this also happens with the default STV ... So nobody else is seeing this ?

Dirk

[robogeek]

Yeah, had the same thing here. The release notes for 6.4.3 has this in the STV Updates section:

2. Added Detailed Setup -> Customize option for "User Input Timeout before loading thumbnails", controlling how long after the user's last input SageTV will wait before loading the actual thumbnail instead of a generic filler thumbnail.

The setting is located in the Detailed Setup -> Customize -> Inactiviy Timeout and OSD AutoHide option. I dropped mine to 100ms and now the thumbnails come up quicker, but I'm still not a fan of the placeholder image flashing on the screen for that short time.

[Narflex]

Originally Posted by robogeek

Yeah, had the same thing here. The release notes for 6.4.3 has this in the STV Updates section:



The setting is located in the Detailed Setup -> Customize -> Inactiviy Timeout and OSD AutoHide option. I dropped mine to 100ms and now the thumbnails come up quicker, but I'm still not a fan of the placeholder image flashing on the screen for that short time.

There's properties for "ui/default_music_icon" (and video, photo, dvd) and if you set them to an image path that does not exist then it should show you nothing instead of the placeholder image.

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by robogeek

Yeah, had the same thing here. The release notes for 6.4.3 has this in the STV Updates section:



The setting is located in the Detailed Setup -> Customize -> Inactiviy Timeout and OSD AutoHide option. I dropped mine to 100ms and now the thumbnails come up quicker, but I'm still not a fan of the placeholder image flashing on the screen for that short time.

Thanks for the pointer. I just switched back to 6.4 and set it to 1 ms, but the thumbnails still take about 3 seconds to appear.

Dirk

[Opus4]

The core now automatically delays image loading:

1. Added optimized delayed image loading support for album art from music files
4. Added user event time tracking so we can better optimize delayed image loading
7. Optimized delayed image loading support for video/picture thumbnails
8. Use generic images when we're in the process of delayed loading a MediaFiles thumbnail

And, the default UI has the timeout option mentioned above.

This helps the UI be more repsonsive because previously, scrolling & moving around the UI would get slowed down because it had to wait for the thumbs to load. Some of the menus in the default UI had code to delay the image loading, but not all menus did -- that delay code was removed now that the core handles it.

It should also improve scrolling & UI response in SageMC because I don't believe it had any code to delay thumbnail loading to begin with.

- Andy

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by Narflex

There's properties for "ui/default_music_icon" (and video, photo, dvd) and if you set them to an image path that does not exist then it should show you nothing instead of the placeholder image.

Thank you Jeff, you spared me another post I was just about to make, begging for being able to disable that...

Any idea why the thumbnail loading would be soooo much slower in 6.4 for me ?


Dirk

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by Opus4

The core now automatically delays image loading:

Hi Andy,

can this be disabled ?


Dirk

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by flachbar

can this be disabled ?

I don't remember seeing a setting for that & I'm not in a position to look that up at the moment. Maybe Jeff will see the question...

- Andy

[gplasky]

I have to join in on this thread because I'm seeing the same sort of delay. I do not like the delay or the placeholder showing up all the time. (Which it does.) I would rather have an option to set it as before. I'll set a path to lose the placeholder but the delay is bad.

Gerry

[kricker]

I wouldn't say it's bad per se. It has speed up the UI responsiveness for me in SageMC. I did think it took a bit too long to load the thumbnail though. I saw the setting but didn't mess with it yet. I'll do that and see if it comes up quicker. I'll also make the change to show no thumbnail until it loads the proper one.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by kricker

I wouldn't say it's bad per se. It has speed up the UI responsiveness for me in SageMC.

See-I never had an issue with the UI responsiveness for the default SageTV or SageMC. So now it MAKES it look slow with everytime you scroll around a list of recordings and first the placeholder shows and then the image. The wife wanted to know what was wrong with it-why was is running so slow that the little pictures aren't coming up right away.

Wife asking questions=bad


Gerry

[kricker]

I understand that. I hate when I hear "...whats wrong with the....".

SageMCs interface wasn't always slow. Just at random times, it might not even be related to the thumbnails, but so far it seems smooth now.

[cgreenle]

I'll throw in my two cents....

It has slowed me down considerably!! I too would like to the option of disabling this enhancement if possible.

Has anyone seen a problem with the 'GiantVersion' of the thumbnail under videos? When I select the thumbnail under the video details, I get a giant black box.

I hacked up my STV and got it working again but I know that it's not been fixed. I'm extremely green on troubleshooting with studio but it seemed that it was getting a false 'true' when it encounters the 'HasAnyThumbnail' condition. All my videos have .jpg files for the thumbnails.

Later

[nielm]

I have not tried it, but if you set the timeout to 0, won't it load the images immediately?

Ok, tried it, setting it to 0 is not accepted setting it to 1 works though, and the placeholder images are not displayed.

[dflachbart]

Well, in my case I can say it hasn't sped up the UI at all. True, before this change a page down on the videos page 'blocked' for maybe a second while getting the thumbnails from the server, whereas now the cursor moves instantly. But now I have to stare at the placeholder icon (or empty space if reconfigured) for four or five seconds - so effectively it's way slower than before. I completely understand the rationale behind this change, and architecture-wise it surely might be the right way to do it, but the effect unfortunately is that the UI experience suffers, at least on certain systems.

Dirk

[Razillian]

I made both changes and set the placeholder images to "blank.png", which I don't think exists. I also changed the "Setup->Detailed Setup->Customize->Inactivity Timeout and OSD Autohide->User input timeout before loading thumbnails" to 100ms. Now my video images appear almost as fast I can scroll without any placeholder being loaded first.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by nielm

I have not tried it, but if you set the timeout to 0, won't it load the images immediately?

Ok, tried it, setting it to 0 is not accepted setting it to 1 works though, and the placeholder images are not displayed.

What properties value is that? I had noticed that images were loading slower over my Placeshifter than they had before.

[karljayne]

Is the setting to disable thumbnails documented somewhere, we just want to watch shows, the preview of the advertisment before the show doesn't really do us any good, the the thumbnail generater is delaying what we really want to do, watch shows.

help, please point us to the setting to disable the tumbnails.

[gjvrieze]

Originally Posted by karljayne

Is the setting to disable thumbnails documented somewhere, we just want to watch shows, the preview of the advertisment before the show doesn't really do us any good, the the thumbnail generater is delaying what we really want to do, watch shows.

help, please point us to the setting to disable the tumbnails.

Remember to close Sage and stop the service before messing the sage.properties file

Change this line

video_thumbnail_generation=true

To

video_thumbnail_generation=false

[gjvrieze]

Does anybody know if the above listed setting can be used on the HD100, as I would like to have some clients, have thumbnails and other not..??