OSMC SKIN: Crisp background picture

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

Hi,

how can I configure OSMC skin to display custom background picture as crisp as possible ? I’m using picture view from file manager and detect an much better resolved picture.
What’s correct skin setting of background colour and opacity do display “high res” picture without loss of quality?

2

You would want you custom background image to be the exact resolution that you have your UI set at so Kodi doesn’t have to scale it. I think might also have to override the cache settings to allow larger images with an advancedsettings.xml file with something like this…

<advancedsettings>
	<imageres>720</imageres>
	<fanartres>1080</fanartres>
</advancedsettings>

…and probably set the background again using a different file name so it get cached again at the higher resolution. Be aware this is going to make your cache larger for any new images you bring in which might slow down your UI. I’ve been using using those settings for a while now on my 3b+ with my entire library cached at that higher resolution though, and not had an issue, so it should be fine.

3

Thank you for pointing me into the advancedsettings area.
I changed both entry values to 1080 and deleted the thumbnail folder.
Background image is coming up as expected after reboot. Rescale artefacts are
gone.
But after playing a video, GUI returns again with the noisy rescaled image from thumbnails
folder. It seems that the thumbnailed picture size is limited to 255kB.
Changing the advancedsettings values to “9999” as noted in Kodi Wiki won’t work either.

4

I did not tell you to do either of those things

The first time an image is displayed it is pulled from the original and then it gets cached so this would be expected behavior. There is not a file size limit to the cached images. You may have made an error in your xml. I would suggest to post full logs so we can look at exactly what you have set.

That is not a value you would want to use on a sbc with limited ram, cpu, and storage.

There are three issues I addressed with my first reply. The first is the quality of scaling which is best solved by resizing the image on a PC or with something that is designed to optimize quality over speed. The second is making the new size the same as your UI is set so this image is displayed at 1:1 when the larger size is allowed to be cached. The third is setting Kodi so when it caches this image it does not attempt to rescale the image.

5

Thank you for your detailed answer and your patience.

The third is setting Kodi so when it caches this image it does not attempt to rescale the image.:

and renaming the file to force caching

solved the problem.

1 Like