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[panamac]

Hi,

I have been using JRiver solely for videos as it's the only player that seems to have made any real stab at having a real video library manager. However one thing that's bothered me is the very low quality presentation of video thumbnails, and I was hoping it could be improved!

The first problem is that generated thumbnails are stored at very low resolution and with relatively high jpeg compression. Any thumbnail display size over half way on along the slider produces an enlarged image which looks awful. This seems unnecessary as the space taken up by even large thumbnails is pretty negligible.

http://a.pomf.se/lcnviq.png

The other, maybe less important, problem is that the thumbnails seem to be scaled using low quality interpolation which leaves a lot of aliasing. There is a setting in the preferences to render the whole interface with 16x antialiasing! The rest of the interface looking so polished makes this stand out even more. I'm not sure if the thumbnails are scaled on the GPU but maybe a nice shader like one of Mathias' might be useful here too!

http://a.pomf.se/zwmknv.png

This is one of my only few quibbles with JRiver, but it is frustrating, as at the moment my video collection looks much nicer when browsing in Explorer than JRiver.

Thanks for considering this!

[6233638]

Thumbnail quality has long been a complaint of mine, but I think there are a few specific issues here.
 
First, if the video is from a television show for example, the episode thumbnail is provided by TheTVDB, or if it's from YouTube they seem to get the thumbnail from there - I don't know if that applies to your example, but those images are often very low resolution.
 
Secondly, I agree that Media Center should be generating higher resolution thumbnails for videos than it currently does. There's no reason they couldn't be saved at the video's native resolution instead of the low resolution, highly compressed thumbnails it currently generates.
Now they don't have to be PNG screenshots, but they do need to at least use full resolution chroma, and the less compression used the better. For high quality JPG I wouldn't use anything less than 95, and anything below 90 just looks awful.
 
The anti-aliasing setting only applied to Theater View, I believe, and has been broken for a long time. Thumbnail/image scaling is unrelated to that setting.
I would assume that this area has not received much attention because they will be migrating from DirectX to OpenGL to support Theater View on OS X and Linux.
 
What you won't have noticed by only using Media Center for video, is that at large sizes you do generally get high quality for album art (though Media Center converts lossless PNG cover art to JPG) but at anything below about 400x400 the quality is pretty rough, and below about 160x160 it is completely unacceptable.
 
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=85083.0

[JimH]

We'll take a look.

And welcome to the forum.

[panamac]

Thanks Jim, appreciated! 

[Hendrik]

Thumbnails are by definition small images, and also for technical reasons. Thumbs are cached directly in the database, loaded in memory entirely and transfered over the network as a big blob when connecting to a library server. Because of this we cannot just store uncompressed full-size "thumbnails" of the videos.

MC currently stores 4 sizes of thumbs, 400x400, 160x160 and 64x64 (before aspect ratio correction). When downscaling, images are slightly sharpened afterwards, which may cause your "aliasing", I suppose.

We cannot change the sizes easily, so we'll probably have to stick with those. Maybe I can see about changing the quality a bit.

[fitbrit]

The quality of the large thumbnail for TV shows during the *Opening* screen is particularly disturbing on large screens.

[Hendrik]

The quality of the large thumbnail for TV shows during the *Opening* screen is particularly disturbing on large screens.

Those images often come from TheTVDB, in the same resolution as MCs highest quality thumbs, 400x400 (scaled for aspect ratio, often 400x225 for 16:9)
I can try to ensure that we don't destroy any quality in those thumbs, but I can't improve it. I can check what kind of scaling we use when enlarging them ..

And even for self-captured thumbs, changing the resolution we store in MC is not something easily done.

[fitbrit]

Thanks, Hendrik.