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Author Topic: Are the covers downsampled? and greedy spectrum analyzer  (Read 4284 times)

Mastiff

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Are the covers downsampled? and greedy spectrum analyzer
« on: December 02, 2016, 06:18:12 pm »

I discovered that a cover that's nice looking in the Raspberry Pi's image viewer looks very blocky and bad in MC's Display View. Is there some downsampling going on here, and is it possible to turn that off?

Another thing: I thought MC was pretty unresponsive a lot of the time, even for weak hardware like the Pi. Turned out that disabling the spectrum alalysers in the top of the window helped surprisingly much. So that one's a greedy thing.
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bob

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Re: Are the covers downsampled? and greedy spectrum analyzer
« Reply #1 on: December 05, 2016, 11:14:18 am »

I discovered that a cover that's nice looking in the Raspberry Pi's image viewer looks very blocky and bad in MC's Display View. Is there some downsampling going on here, and is it possible to turn that off?

Another thing: I thought MC was pretty unresponsive a lot of the time, even for weak hardware like the Pi. Turned out that disabling the spectrum alalysers in the top of the window helped surprisingly much. So that one's a greedy thing.
Not aware of any image downsampling going on. Do you have a x86 linux install? If so does the same thing happen there?
The spectrum analyzer is problematic, I've not figured how it seems to work on some systems without eating CPU but not on others.
What kind of source material are you playing? To what device?
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Mastiff

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Re: Are the covers downsampled? and greedy spectrum analyzer
« Reply #2 on: December 06, 2016, 02:13:46 am »

No, the only Linux I have is the Pi. I'm not big on Linux, really. Just wanted something small that I could use in the car. :)

I am playing medium to high quality VBR MP4 LAME encoded (192 and up), and the device does not matter, it seems. Both to Bluetooth, HDMI and analogue output (three way minijack) I get the same slowdown with the analyzer.
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bob

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Re: Are the covers downsampled? and greedy spectrum analyzer
« Reply #3 on: December 06, 2016, 10:13:29 am »

No, the only Linux I have is the Pi. I'm not big on Linux, really. Just wanted something small that I could use in the car. :)

I am playing medium to high quality VBR MP4 LAME encoded (192 and up), and the device does not matter, it seems. Both to Bluetooth, HDMI and analogue output (three way minijack) I get the same slowdown with the analyzer.
How are you running X on the Pi? With the dummy XServer, the real xserver without a display attached or something else?
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Mastiff

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Re: Are the covers downsampled? and greedy spectrum analyzer
« Reply #4 on: December 06, 2016, 10:19:47 am »

X? Sorry, I have no idea what you are talking about... I'm just running Raspbian from the NOOBS setup, with MC autostarting.
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bob

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Re: Are the covers downsampled? and greedy spectrum analyzer
« Reply #5 on: December 06, 2016, 10:31:55 am »

X? Sorry, I have no idea what you are talking about... I'm just running Raspbian from the NOOBS setup, with MC autostarting.
MC requires the X windows system to run.
If you are just running a stock install you are using the real X server on the Pi graphics hardware.
There are ways of running MC on linux headless that don't involve the actual graphics hardware of the Pi.
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Mastiff

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Re: Are the covers downsampled? and greedy spectrum analyzer
« Reply #6 on: December 07, 2016, 02:19:09 am »

I see. There's how much I know about Linux... ;) Well, I would say that running headless is a bit of a defeat, since I have spent 500 dollars and two days in the garage to get a video input to the Volvo, so I can see track info and cover in the car. :D I guess headless means that there's no graphic output, right?
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bob

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Re: Are the covers downsampled? and greedy spectrum analyzer
« Reply #7 on: December 08, 2016, 12:34:53 pm »

I see. There's how much I know about Linux... ;) Well, I would say that running headless is a bit of a defeat, since I have spent 500 dollars and two days in the garage to get a video input to the Volvo, so I can see track info and cover in the car. :D I guess headless means that there's no graphic output, right?
Certainly in this case you don't want to run headless!

The next build will have the spectrum analyzer disabled on ARM. After a lot of research it appears the only way to get decent performance out of it on ARM is to use a Pi specific GPU fft and we don't want to limit ourselves to running only on the Pi.
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Mastiff

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Re: Are the covers downsampled? and greedy spectrum analyzer
« Reply #8 on: December 09, 2016, 02:20:23 am »

Sounds reasonable, yeah. :)
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