Poll for new EPG123 feature

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Should there be an option in EPG123 to embed images in the MXF file?

Poll ended at Sat Jun 11, 2016 3:29 am

Yes
13
76%
No
4
24%
 
Total votes: 17

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garyan2

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Poll for new EPG123 feature

#1

Post by garyan2 » Wed Jun 01, 2016 3:29 am

When working on some other things, I figured out how to embed images in the .mxf file. This means that you could possibly enjoy a rich guide on a computer that does not have internet access and still have all the series/program images and movie posters. If you use the .\logos directory to override station logos then they will also be included. It also means that for all media centers, the images will be immediate ... no internet calls to download the image while browsing through the guide.

The downside is that would be even more files to cache and larger mxf file to import to take a bit more time.
- Gary
Keeping WMC alive beyond January 2020. https://garyan2.github.io

Sammy2

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#2

Post by Sammy2 » Wed Jun 01, 2016 3:28 pm

garyan2 wrote:When working on some other things, I figured out how to embed images in the .mxf file. This means that you could possibly enjoy a rich guide on a computer that does not have internet access and still have all the series/program images and movie posters. If you use the .\logos directory to override station logos then they will also be included. It also means that for all media centers, the images will be immediate ... no internet calls to download the image while browsing through the guide.

The downside is that would be even more files to cache and larger mxf file to import to take a bit more time.
Before I vote, how much space on the boot drive would this take? I have all the premium movie channels so we're probably talking about 10000 entries for a 21-day guide. I have a 250Gb Samsung EVO 830 SSD for a boot drive but also run Emby on it which has it's own database information stored on it.

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garyan2

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#3

Post by garyan2 » Wed Jun 01, 2016 4:44 pm

I haven't run through that exercise yet, but my best SWAG would be to take the number of image links noted in the trace.log file and multiply by 60KB. That would be a conservative amount that will be added to the cache. Multiply it by 2 for all that data to be also stored in the mxf file itself.

So having 10000 image links will probably result in an additional ~1.2GB space requirement.

Again, just a SWAG ... I can have better numbers when I run through the exercise.
- Gary
Keeping WMC alive beyond January 2020. https://garyan2.github.io

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#4

Post by Sammy2 » Wed Jun 01, 2016 5:08 pm

How long does it take to grab the image with an i5-4690K Devil's Canyon and a 60mbps internet connection? It seems pretty instantaneous now for me but I see lag from time to time.

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Ladislaus

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#5

Post by Ladislaus » Wed Jun 01, 2016 8:11 pm

garyan2 wrote:Should there be an option in EPG123 to embed images in the MXF file?
Such an option would be nice provided that users could decide (i.e., by checking/unchecking a checkbox in the Epg123 application) to embed (or not) based on their needs, preferences, situation, etc.

I am very curious to read about your test results regarding load time with/without embedded images.

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#6

Post by NNate » Wed Jun 01, 2016 9:06 pm

How much would that impact guide loading on reboot?

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garyan2

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#7

Post by garyan2 » Thu Jun 02, 2016 3:04 pm

garyan2 wrote:I haven't run through that exercise yet, but my best SWAG would be to take the number of image links noted in the trace.log file and multiply by 60KB. That would be a conservative amount that will be added to the cache. Multiply it by 2 for all that data to be also stored in the mxf file itself.

So having 10000 image links will probably result in an additional ~1.2GB space requirement.

Again, just a SWAG ... I can have better numbers when I run through the exercise.
I'm going to have to seriously revise my SWAG ... I underestimated the overhead (+60%!) of embedding the images in the mxf file.

For 10000 images at 60KB, the additional space requirement will be:
Cache = 10000 * 60KB = 600000KB
MXF File = 10000 * 60KB * 1.6 = 960000KB
Additional space requirement = 1560000KB => 1.49GB

I'm still working on the code for this and will see if I can reduce the load (compress/resize some images) ... so still in work, will keep everyone updated.
- Gary
Keeping WMC alive beyond January 2020. https://garyan2.github.io

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#8

Post by garyan2 » Sun Jun 05, 2016 12:41 am

Okay, good and bad news ... well, bad news anyway. Though I can embed the series images in the mxf file, it doesn't use them so we get no benefit. It does work for station logos no problem, don't know why it won't do the other images. I've tried multiple image formats and still no success (may be a bit depth or size limitation or something). I haven't given up ... I'm just going to put this off until later.

I suppose the good news is you can embed the station logos which means in a whole home configuration you could manage to not have to install MCL XL on all the clients. You would just need to populate the .\logos directory of the server with all the logos.
- Gary
Keeping WMC alive beyond January 2020. https://garyan2.github.io

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#9

Post by glugglug » Fri Jul 08, 2016 3:34 am

Something I figured out about the guide image download back when Rovi was using > 6 megapixel guide images slowing extenders to a crawl:

The download is asynchronous to browsing the guide. When you select a cell in the guide, this starts the download. If you clear your IE cache and scroll quickly through the guide while capturing the network traffic in Wireshark, you can frequently see the pending guide image requests pipelined 10 deep before the first image is received.

If the image download has completed, the image is sent to the screen (or an extender), and the extender pauses until the image finishes being sent from the PC and I guess scaled for the display. On the local PC the scaling and display happens too fast to notice.

Actually... this gives me an idea on how you can accomplish fully offline guide images..

The images are displayed from the IE browser cache. This means if you navigate to all the images in a hidden IE browser all guide images will become local for WMC. I am wondering if the cache is shared with System.Net.WebClient? If so, the act of fetching all the images with that will cause them to be cached locally, as long as you are running as the same user as WMC..... -- sadly the fact the guide image cache is the browser cache means a separate copy of all the guide images ends up cached for each extender, and they need to be fetched separately as each extender user. Anyways, for extenders it's a little silly. If you have decent internet, the download is faster than the extender renders the image.

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garyan2

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#10

Post by garyan2 » Fri Jul 08, 2016 4:24 am

My goal was really towards the Whole Home usage so all clients would have instant images. What you discovered in the past fills in some blanks on why I could not achieve that ... kind of a bummer, really. I didn't know they were cached in the browser cache ... I was thinking maybe using the epg123 cache directory and the file url but I don't think there would be much benefit to that and it certainly would not work for whole home.
- Gary
Keeping WMC alive beyond January 2020. https://garyan2.github.io

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#11

Post by Sammy2 » Fri Jul 08, 2016 2:40 pm

I never notice much lag on my echo extenders.. Not any more than on the HTPC itself which is minimal at most.

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