I have the Vero 4k+ since half a year and I love it. A device with great features that gets new features and bug fixes years after its release with such an active team and community behind it is a rare sight and something I really appreciate.
There is one minor issue I initially thought I caused myself during setup and config but a clean install of the latest osmc version didn’t fix it so I thought I post it here.
About half of the movie posters/covers in my library do not load correctly. There is a small white-ish line on the right edge of the movie cover. I’ve attached two pictures below where this is hopefully visible. Sometimes the movie cover loads correctly when selecting the movie and then going back to the list view.
This is happening both on the OSMC and the Estuary skin. To eliminate other potential sources of error, I should probably also mention that I don’t host my kodi library on a server or use movie covers from .mkv file tags or anything like that. I set up my library locally after initial setup while setting the sources (USB-HDD, no NAS) and use the tmdb scraper, probaby like most people would.
I get posters like this, I’ve always assumed its a corruption in the posters provided. I just a new poster under choose art, which doesn’t have the issue.
I don’t think that the posters from tmdb are the problem, because I have never seen this with kodi on windows and when selecting the movie and then going back to list view it often loads correctly. Also, after a reboot movies posters that where fine before don’t load correctly anymore and vice versa.
I think the issue here is getting posters in an aspect ratio of something other than 2:3 which I think causes issues with the cached copy. It is very common for artwork on TMDB to be slightly off. The reason why you might not see it at first scan is that the UI is not displaying from the cached copy the very first time it is displayed. I think you will find that if you grab the same artwork, crop it, and store it next to the movie with the same name as the movie (or if you have each movie in its own folder as folder.[ext]) and then in Kodi highlight the movie>context menu>info (or if using an OSMC remote just use the “i” button)>refresh then the artwork should no longer have that artifact.
Do note that once you swap local artwork Kodi will not want to recache a file of the same name for 24 hours. After this time Kodi will swap to a new image if it sees an updated time stamp.
It is. I use Tiny Media Manager to generate local metadata for all my movies and for every one it shows the various artwork available on TMM and it shows their resolution and I constantly see lots of artwork just slightly off. I think The scaler in the UI is doing okay when it has more resolution to start with but the size of the artwork that OSMC caches is quite small. When the aspect ratio is off AND the resolution of the artwork it is pulling from is particularly small, then this is where the problem crops up. It is possible to cache larger and I think this is less prone to display this problem. If you do so the UI might be slightly slower, and the posters will look degraded in the OSMC skin (IMO they look better using Estuary) but there isn’t much harm in playing around with this. What you would do is make a advancedsettings.xml file like this…
Thanks for your answers!
I will give the advancedsettings.xml tomorrow or this weekend a try.
I’m still confused that there is no consistency or pattern with this issue though.
I know that many posters on TMDB do not fit 2:3 aspect ratio exactly. In fact, some of the movie posters the scraper pulls by default are in a very different aspect ratio (mostly older or foreign titles) than 2:3 but they still display correctly or with just as little white-ish line as popular modern titles which mostly are exactly 2:3 or very close to 2:3.
Also strange that some posters look fine and then after reboot do not anymore or the other way around.
There is. If you take one of the posters that displays the issue it will always display the issue. If you resize it so the resolution perfectly matches a clean 2:3 aspect ratio the problem never shows up. Not having it 2:3 doesn’t guarantee the line will show up, but when it does this is the reason because the scaler used for the caching in OSMC isn’t great.
When Kodi calls for an uncached image it grabs it from source and scales that full resolution image down to what the UI is calling for. In a separate process this image is scaled down and saved in the thumbnail cache. When you reboot this original scaled image is no longer in memory so it pulls the image from the Thumbnails folder, scales it down to what the UI is calling for and now you have the different image from what you were looking at before the reboot.
I’ve tried this yesterday and it works, haven’t seen the issue since . It took some time to load and cache the movie posters again though. Because of the higher resoultion they look noticeably better now and while scrolling feels slightly more sluggish, it is not as bad as I expected it to be, so definitely a worth tradeoff.
I might try to lower the resolution in the advancedsettings.xml sometime to find the “sweet spot” between correctly displayed posters and fast UI.
Btw, what are OSMC’s default values for <imageres> and <fanartres>?
Really neat solution as I use the Estuary skin anyway and I already have to use an advancedsettings.xml for the extras addon.
Thanks again for your help @darwindesign!
These resolutions where chosen to provide the best quality image in the OSMC skin. Different skins and different views in those skins use different size artwork so the effect of this is very dependent on a users preferences. What I posted above returns the thumbnail cache sizes back to Kodi stock values.
I have done a lot of trouble shooting on this issue back in the day and have come to the conclusion that if the aspect ratio is not 2:3 for your poster you will have this issue IF your incorrect poster ratio favors vertical, if it favors horizontal it’s a non issue.
So as an example, many 2:3 posters are 1000x1500 pixels.
If your poster is 1000x1501, you will have issues.
If your poster is 1001x1500, you will not have the issue.
The issue is only drawn on the vertical edge, never the horizontal.
I have many posters that are not 2:3 and they display just fine because they favor width over height.
In my collection, I try to use the original Bluray covers since I have a lot of movies from boutique publishers like Criterion, Arrow, and Shout.
Some times I will have the same movie from two different publishers.
Using the actual Bluray covers gives me a quick visual cue as to which one I’m selecting.
I get my posters for Criterion released movies straight from their website and they are 1288x1600.
I used to make custom Criterion covers to fit 2:3 to avoid this issue.
Many hours were spent in photoshop.
And the issue was never the 1288x1600 cover I got from Criterion.
It was always caused by a different cover that scraped from TMDb, and then it messes up other covers.
Example of original Criterion cover:
. It took some time to load and cache the movie posters again though. Because of the higher resoultion they look noticeably better now and while scrolling feels slightly more sluggish, it is not as bad as I expected it to be, so definitely a worth tradeoff.
