Recomended Spec

[Karaokedude]

I have a small Form Factor PC P3 550 i have installed XP on to it and  some MPs

just wondered if there is a recomended min spec
as i have noticed it runs fine but if i use the left right keys to scroll through  selections the music stutters

unless there is a buffer issue and i can increase the buffer for the music apart from that seems to work fine

[Chris]

CD skins require more resources than classic skins because they have to load the cover art.  Try going into the skin file and disabling the scrolling animation.  If that makes it go away we can tinker from there.  If it doesn't, the problem is probably a slow hard drive, which is possible in an SFF PC.  Another possibility is oversized cover art files: the entire file has to be loaded and resampled to match the size onscreen; if you have high-resolution cover art images this could be the problem.  My cover art images are generally 200x200 or 300x300 and 10K or less in file size.  How large are your cover art images?

--Chris

[Karaokedude]

cheers i will have a play about

i disabled the animation and didnt make any difference so i  put a hash in front of everything in the cd art section in the jukeebox.ini  so that it loaded the default image and seems ok so looks like its down the file res and size

[Chris]

cheers i will have a play about

i disabled the animation and didnt make any difference so i  put a hash in front of everything in the cd art section in the jukeebox.ini  so that it loaded the default image and seems ok so looks like its down the file res and size

Let me know how big the files turn out to be.  If they're megabytes in size, I'd suggest making them smaller, but if they're 50K or less I may need to rewrite the image loader.

Thanks!

--Chris

[Karaokedude]

resized the jpgs to 100 X 100  come in at about 69K with quality set to 10 and seem ok just loose the quality a bit but still look OK

[Chris]

69K at 100x100?  That's odd... even a completely uncompressed 32-bit bitmap at 100x100 takes less than 40K.  Is that 100x100 pixels, or 100x100 DPI?

[Karaokedude]

my mistake

thats what i tried first and looked awful

150 X 150  pixels

[Chris]

my mistake

thats what i tried first and looked awful

150 X 150  pixels

Probably be better at 200x200 with slightly lower quality. What size were the files when it wasn't working?

[Karaokedude]

they were various although some i noticed were 1200 by 1200 but none were any bigger than 260k

[Chris]

they were various although some i noticed were 1200 by 1200 but none were any bigger than 260k

With four images per page by default, that's a full megabyte of data to load from disk on each page change.  A modern PC might be able to do it without skipping, but an older one certainly couldn't.

I should probably at least throw a warning into the log file if images of this size are being encountered. Thanks for your help!

[Karaokedude]

small form factor pc is only p3 550 not sure if it will take a faster CPU but i will try 200 by 200 and see what happens

main pc is a 3.4 p4 so prob not a good benchmark for testing as it will run most anything

looking for a small and cheap pc to fit into the rockola tri vues when they arrive due to space

[Karaokedude]

Sound still skips now and then if you select a different page on a cd skin
havnt worked out whats causing it im not sure of the bit rate of the files would it be worth dropping to 128 I had a quick look at a few and some are 192 and some are 256
so wondered if the file gets loaded into a buffer and if so can i increase the buffer size

 

[Chris]

Sound still skips now and then if you select a different page on a cd skin
havnt worked out whats causing it im not sure of the bit rate of the files would it be worth dropping to 128 I had a quick look at a few and some are 192 and some are 256
so wondered if the file gets loaded into a buffer and if so can i increase the buffer size

The playback buffer is not currently adjustable.  I think I need to break down and just rewrite the image loader to poll the playback engine every 100K or so, or at least make it an option (as doing so will slow down the loader.)

--Chris