Hi, I got my new vero4k+ and am super impressed with it’s playback capabilities. Right now it’s just hooked up to a Windows 10 SMB share with autofs and all my 4k rips play flawlessly, scrubbing is super responsive.
One thing with the UI though, I found the default (720) image res for posters looked fairly poor on 4k screen in some of the more modern skins with larger posters. So I bumped it up to 1080 in advancedsettings. It works fine and stays responsive in all views except for panel style views where there are 10+ posters or fanarts on screen at once. I’ve noticed this across several skins including estuary so I don’t think it’s the skin I’m working on per se.
Has anyone had this issue with bumping the imageres to 1080?? One thing I notice is that if I scroll to th bottom of my list and then back to the top it seems to be recaching the images, which I hadn’t noticed happening using the same skin on a PC previously. Not sure though. I assume it’s saturating the RAM? Are there any settings that can be played with to improve the image caching?
Just to add to this, I’ve been comparing via different HDMI inputs to see how the Vero4k stacks up against my PC, obviously not expecting it to match. But I noticed that the UI appears to be rendered at a lower res even though my output is set to 3840x2160. Media playback looks great, but even vector elements of the UI like text look a bit blurry, wheras on my Windows Kodi instance, they would be rendered at a native 4k resolution.
What is the output resolution for the vero4k front end and is it something that can be adjusted or does that tank performance?
We recommend people with 4K TV’s set their user interface (UI) to 1080p. Kodi’s UI is not optimized for 4K yet and this can put unnecessary demands on your device and can lead to a suboptimal picture quality, as well as potentially cause other issues.
With the above settings your UI will be output in Full HD and your 4K content will be output in 4K. *Information regarding the whitelist can be found here. If you have any doubt, feel free to upload some logs so we can verify that your settings are indeed correct.
Thanks for the quick reply and the advice. I changed to the settings you recommend. It helped somewhat but it is still very choppy on views I would hope for it to be able to handle. E.g. Shift view on Estuaray. Looking at the Kodi onscreen logging, my memory is floating around 1000-1300/1764MB range but the CPU is spiking all the way up to 200-300% on scrolling. I’ll try rebuilding my library without 1080 to see if that fixes it, although I believe that is just for posters and is what controls fanarts. I haven’t changed that one and it’s still struggling with my panel viws on fanart as well.
The playback is perfect, but I think for what I’m looking for, I might be expecting a bit too much from the device.
If changing advancedsettings doesn’t help, I’ll post some logs, thanks
I deleted advancedsettings, removed sources and then rescraped - assuming that’s enough to clear the cache.
It’s still seems to be struggling more than I thought with panel views, I don’t think it comes across too well in the video but the framerate seems to drop and it gets very choppy especially when you go from the end to the beginning: https://photos.app.goo.gl/yjtjBi8BXW8DiXSDA
Does the CPU usage look normal? Memory usage is less than 1000MB now so I don’t think it’s that.
Although there may be a better way to clear it so I’d wait for someone more knowledgeable to advise.
However I’d question whether some of those images are actually cached yet? Just tried that skin/view and I don’t get anywhere near the same issue your having. Maybe use use the Texture Cache Maintenance Utility to preload the images and see if there’s an improvement? Having a large library I found it useful as after a week of normal usage some images still hadn’t cached.
Thanks, from what you’re saying it could be that the cache wasn’t actually deleted, in which case I originally copy/pasted my Windows advancedsettingsfile which had much higher values, which might be causing the problem. Let me try your fix to ensure it’s definitely cleared and they’re being cached at the default size.
For this application what you posted is correct. You can just delete the entire Thumbnails folder instead of its contents, and you don’t need to force it, but the end result is the same regardless.
It would not have been without actually removing the thumbs or the db that keeps track of them. There is multiple things that are interlinked here so it can get a bit confusing.
First, OSMC by default caches thumbs at a lower resolution that stock Kodi so there is a difference there.
Second, Kodi is not great in how it loads images so whenever you enter a view that has a large number of items and the display is showing artwork for each of them, then Kodi is loading more than just what is visible on the screen which slows it down. Also unless all the items have already been cached then resources will be taken up by generating thumbs. Resources will also be taken up in newer libraries when you navigate and it has to figure out media info entries for the db. Basically, you have to give some time with larger libraries before judging speed impacts. The only way to speed it up would be to just sit there and shift the focus item to item until everything has been touched. Also, if your speed benchmark is a PC running Kodi then nothing will compare and you will always be disappointed. SBC’s and the like should only really be compared to other low cost, low power draw devices.
Third, the thumbnails almost always must be scaled again for the final UI and we are unfortunately stuck with, at the moment at least, a poor quality scaler for the last step in the chain. Because this scaler performs worse the larger the shift, you can actually get worse results by enabling larger thumbnails to be generated. This is somewhat confusing to most I would imagine, but I think it is covered fairly well in the following thread…