Performance - Media Browsing

"How can I optimize media cover art browsing?"

f you are using one of the non-Charmed Quark media repositories (e.g. JRiver or DVDProfiler), then the cover art files are probably stored there somewhere in the directories created by the third party media manager program, probably as JPEG files. These files are often considerably larger than they need to be. You can drastically speed up browsing if you reduce these files in terms of byte size. CQC provides a small utility to help you do this. It is called CQCRescaleImgs. It's not on the start menu, since it's rarely used and it's a command line program. To use it do the following:
In the Start Menu, go to the Charmed Quark Controller section
Click on the CQC Command Prompt
Once there you can type CQCRescaleImgs to run the program. If you run it without parameters, it will give you a usage display and exit without doing anything. The parameters are:
/MaxH=hhh
/MaxV=vvv
/Recurse
The /MaxH and /MaxV parameters allow you to set the maximum pixel sizes of the images. Any images that are larger than this will be reduced to this size. Defaults for both are 192 if they are not provided. If a file is larger in the horizontal than the MaxH but ok in the vertical, then it will be scaled to fit horizontal, and vice versa, scaling the other axis to keep the aspect ratio the same. If both are too big, the larger one is scaled to fit its limit and the other is scaled to maintain aspect ratio.
The /Recurse parameter indicates whether you just want to do files in the target directory, or the target directory and any directories underneath it. According to how your media repository is set up, all the images may be in one directory, of they may be spread around with the titles they represent.
So to run the program, you would do something like:
CQCRescaleImgs F:\MyMedia\Images /MaxH=128 /MaxV=128
This would go to the directory F:\MyMedia\Images and it would scale any images in that directory to fit within 128x128 pixel size limits. If the files were underneath that directory in various subdirectories, you would have added the /Recurse parameter.
The files that are get rescaled are also compressed at a fairly high rate, to reduce their size even more. This can often result in files that are 4 or 8 or 12 KB in side, instead of 50 or 70K. This makes a huge difference in memory usage (the repository driver caches images) and the time it takes to transmit those images across the network to client interfaces that are browsing the cover art.
It won't hurt to run the program on the same directory multiple times. Files that are already within the size limits are not modified, so any files that have already been processed will not be reprocessed again and again (which would reduce their quality badly because of the lossy nature of JPEG files.)
The program will recognize and rescale JPEG, BMP, and PNG files. Others it will ignore.
DVD Profiler
Note that if you are using the DVD Profiler driver, you don't need to do this. It already creates thumbnail images. If has an IMAGES directory that contains the high quality images, and under that is a THUMBNAILS directory which contains copies of those images that are already appropriately small and lightweight, so just point the driver at that directory for images.
Be sure that you have the Thumbnails directory and not the Images directory which is just above it. The Images directory contains quite large images, and this would eat up a lot of memory on the server where the repository driver is running and making browsing much slower.
If you would like higher quality images, you could always run the rescaler on the larger DVD Profiler images directory. You can always get the original images back if you want, since DVD Profiler will re-download them at any time. So it's safe enough to do. This can provide better quality images than the thumbnail images, without the large amount of overhead that using the large images as is. Use MaxH/MaxV of perhaps 512x512 for a good compromise between quality and size.
CQSL Repository
If you are using our CQSL repository, then the images are appropriately scaled as you import them into our repository, so the work is done for you.