I just got my brand new Vero V the other day and have been getting it all set up, but I am having an issue where the quality or resolution of the posters is absolutely terrible and unacceptable. I have looked at previous threads on here and on the Kodi forums related to this issue and it doesn’t seem too uncommon. however, the one difference for my use case is that i am using the Emby for Kodi add-on (in add-on mode, not native) so I’m not too sure how much that would impact or change things.
I have done multiple tests of stop mediacenter, adjust imageres and fanartres in advancedsettings.xml, delete Thumbnails dir and TexturesXX.db, start mediacenter without any luck. Kodi screenshots show the terrible quality present. I’ve changed views, changed skins. No luck.
I have resynced artwork cache from Emby addon and that sometimes seems to resolve the issue temporarily, but then it returns.
The stranger thing is that the actual files in Thumbnails dir look just fine when viewed on my computer.
Kodi resolution is set to 1080p as recommended. TV is 4k, but again kodi screenshot shows the issue present so that’d be before it’s sent to the TV. Should rule out the TV settings itself.
Not sure if it comes through that great in this pic, but you should see that D3 is not that badly impacted, but the others are very grainy/static-y. You can also see it in the kodi screenshot and compare the thumbnail file for the Battleship poster to how it looks in the screenshot.
I sympathise. Poster quality on Kodi is terrible in a 4K world. I’ve tinkered with this based on advice from this forum and might have improved things a bit, but it’s still nowhere near the quality I see when I browse Jellyfin on my iPad or Infuse on an ATV. I guess this is because of limitations with GUI resolution. I’ve come to accept it, given the advantages that Kodi has in other areas vs the competition.
Strange. I switched the GUI to 4K resolution and the posters all cleared up and look great. I switched it back to 1080p and…they still look fine. We’ll see if they end up reverting back to looking horrible again like it did when I cleared cache previously (after clearing it they looked fine for a little bit and then went to crap again).
I don’t understand why Kodi hasn’t put any effort into updating to support 4K properly in 2026.
Ok, now I’m really confused. Based on all the threads I read previously regarding similar issues, etc. everybody recommended leaving the display resolution set to 1080p claiming that if it was set to 4K that it would cause all the lower resolution files to then be upscaled to 4K during playback. However, the Kodi wiki seems to disagree and explicitly states that the setting does NOT affect playback at all. So, WTF? @sam_nazarko is there a reason 1080p is still the recommended setting then?
OSMC to automatically switch the resolution and refresh rate when you start playing back a video. So correct the GUI setting does not impact the playback of the video. Just that when you set the GUI to same resolution as most of your videos are in you save the number of resolution changes when you start a video
Keeping the resolution at FullHD instead of 4k is mainly given for the fact of better GUI response at lower resolution
If your not using a whitelist then Kodi will only switch to different display modes at the GUI resolution or higher. This can have a few consequences. Some displays do not have as many supported refresh rates at 2160p than they do at 1080p so this may cause it to play at a non native refresh rate which can reduce video smoothness. Also a display can often do better upscaling to the native screen resolution than Vero’s or RPi’s.
As for the shit UI artwork quality the issue is not one of GUI resolution or even how well Kodi does with scaling it for the cache copy. The issue is the scaler that resized the cached artwork to the live display is not very good. What’s more is the more it has to scale down the image the worse the quality. The best a user can do at this very moment is decide what view mode they care most about and then set their cache artwork settings to closely match the actual resolution that is being display in that view mode (and IIRC the UI is actually rendered in 1080p even if you are running your UI at 2160p). If Kodi doesn’t have to resize the cached artwork (or at least not much) then you will get less artifacts and blocking.
And when you see the artwork look good once then looks degraded after that, that only happens before the artwork is cached. I suspect that Kodi uses a slower method like using the CPU to do the scaling just for that one instance. There is currently no user controllable method that I am aware of to change what method is used for scaling artwork in the UI.
EDIT: I’ve been informed that OSMC now renders the UI in 2160p when the UI is set to that resolution.
Make what play at non-native refresh rate? As noted in the Kodi wiki link above, this display setting has zero impact on media playback. In fact, according to the wiki, the official recommendation is “The ideal setting is the highest resolution your hardware supports and/or what the TV/Monitor is capable of.”
My understanding is that the cached artwork is stored in the Thumbnails directory. Is that correct? If so, then if your thought that them displaying fine is before they are cached (and stored in Thumbnails) then I would expect the cached version stored in Thumbnails after they start looking like trash in the UI should also look like trash. This is not the case, though. Even after they look like garbage in the UI, meaning they have been cached with the crappy processing, the actual file stored in Thumbnails still looks perfectly fine.
It is common for a display to not support as many refresh rates at 2160p than it does at 1080p. Kodi’s behavior, if not using a whitelist, and using refresh rate switching, is to switch the display mode to either match the resolution and frame rate of the video when it starts playing, or find the closest match, BUT only at the resolution of the UI or higher. If you add a whitelist that includes display modes at resolutions lower than the UI then Kodi will use those when they are the optimal choice and the UI resolution isn’t regarded any more. You can test this yourself if you wish either by making and reading debug logs or by, during playback, long-pressing either the info or menu buttons during playback (I forget which off the top of my head) to view the display mode it switched to.
If no cache hit then Kodi uses a good but slow scaler to show the image on the screen and then kicks off a separate process that caches the artwork storing it in the thumbnails directory using either default options or what has been modified in an advancedsettings.xml file to set how it does this. The next time an image is requested to display it pulls this cached copy and uses a fast but poor quality scaler to resize the image to whatever size is being requested by the UI. Hopefully at some point the OSMC dev team can manage to switch that image scaler to something better, but at this very moment, minimizing how much it has to change the resolution is the only tool that I’ve found to have any impact.
The playback and refresh rate still does not. You say “…BUT only at the resolution of the UI or higher.” However, the Kodi wiki seems to indicate the exact opposite. That the UI display resolution setting has zero impact on the playback of media files. Which would include any limiting of the resolution. This is why I posted the question and my confusion. My reading of threads had seen multiple repeatings of this same idea - that changing the GUI display resolution would somehow limit or impact the playback of media. Your assertion would insinuate that if the GUI display resolution is set to 2160p, that playing back 1080p media would fail to switch to match that media’s refresh and resolution unless it were listed in the whitelist. But a reading of the official Kodi wiki’s sections on both Resolution and Whitelist settings would completely contradict this assertion.
Ok, setting the GUI display to 2160p @ 60Hz with no whitelist and then playing a 1080p movie does in fact properly switch to the correct refresh rate, but stays at 2160p. So it appears that actual testing does confirm that resolution is upscaled even though refresh rate is switched.
Also, with GUI set to 1080p and playing a 4K does properly switch to 4K resolution rather than downscaling.
I re-read the Kodi wiki and it is still not worded very clearly, but the OSMC wiki words it a little more clear. The Kodi wiki seems to insinuate that it matches the display resolution only “When a whitelist is set” when that actually applies regardless of whether a whitelist is set.
So that raises the next question: If the whitelist config is simply toggling on/off the presented options rather than having to write them from scratch (introducing lots of room for error) and the options presented are (or at least SHOULD) be only options supported by the output display (the connected TV), then why the recommendation not to set display to 4K and just enable all the presented whitelist options with the exceptions of the 720/480 related issues noted in the OSMC wiki? Seems that would get you the best of both worlds - 4k GUI display and full support for all your media.
Kodi’s wiki tends to be a simplified guide for a general user base, not an exhaustive guide. The average users eyes would glaze over if you tried outlining the finer points of refresh rate and resolution switching. People looking for more details on specific topics usually find them on Kodi’s forum, github, or from hardware or distro specific forums like this one.
Setting the UI to 2160p has an impact on responsiveness of the UI. Less so with newer SBC media players than it once did, but I assume this is still why the default resolution is what it is. As for the whitelist that can have a lot of things for people to consider with that one. Not running a whitelist leads to the least amount of potential issues and confusions for a general user base so it not being enabled by default makes sense for that reason alone. The setting is not hidden and nobody is ever discouraged from using it without a specific reason why. You can learn more about the ins and outs of this feature in the following howto…
Thanks. That HowTo was actually what I was referring to on the OSMC documentation. According to it, it seems like the only real contention is with certain 720 & 480 media.
As for performance at 2160p GUI…I haven’t noticed any performance issue so far while I had it set to this. But I think this also goes back to my frustration with the market’s insistence to consistently release half-assed under-spec’ed devices. The V has been decent so far, but I still would love to pay an extra $100 or 2 for a version that has higher specs. Namely: faster CPU, more RAM, and higher storage bandwidth (i.e. SSD over eMMC). So, @sam_nazarko if you’re reading in the background go ahead and put me down for yet another vote for something like that (I’ve read a number of posts on here already asking for the same). I have had HTPCs in the past (many many years ago) that are capable of handling very large libraries and browse through artwork-heavy skins with near instant visibility of posters - meaning zero to no delay waiting to load movie posters while scrolling rapidly through the movies.
Regardless, back to my original issue, strangely enough the artwork has stayed looking fine with the switch to Estuary. To be clear, initial switch to Estuary they were still looking trashy. I switched GUI to 4k and they looked fine. I switched GUI back to 1080p and they still looked fine. They have yet to revert to looking crappy again and it’s been a few days. To be fair, I have been switching back and forth between 1080p and 2160p for GUI for testing, but it has sat on 1080p long enough that it would have reverted to garbage based on previous experience. So, perhaps the skin chosen has an effect on it? Who knows.
