I am pulling BLACK MAMBA

BigRoo wrote:

Hi DeV,

 

Just wanted to say thanks for the awesome Theme. Best ive seen !!

Ive got the SMP and i was having issues with getting it to work on mine. 

A member here “Ritaben” was kind enough to help me out with uploading the right files. I got it working today.

I havent worked out how to get the movie sheets displaying as yet. The DVD thumbnail covers display along with the screen shots but my movie sheets are non existent at thsi stage.

 

But anyway i know you dont know anything about the SMP but just wanted to pass on my thanks.   I did notice on the dashboard that the “File Explorer” tab changes to “File Browser” when selected - not sure if thats been brought up before.  

 

Thanx a lot BigRoo :slight_smile:

I named it File Browser because it is not really an explorer with trees and such :slight_smile:

I can’t tell you about movie sheets but when the theme is running on your device the movie sheets should too. …again i am guestemating, put my demo folder on your device and see what it does for you.  If it doesn’t work maybe there is another way to trigger the backdrops, from what I understood is that it worked for others. I am sure there is a forum that has better infos than I have for the SMP.

1 Like

DeVicious wrote:


Thanx a lot BigRoo :slight_smile:

I am sure there is a forum that has better infos than I have for the SMP.

Hi DeV,

Sorry , i wasnt asking for help I was just rambling :slight_smile:

I’ll get it worked out i’m sure.  Anyway thanks again for all your work. You are a talented person.

By the way is it possible to get the background pic of the snake skin without the face and hand?  I just wanted to see what it would look like with snake skin full screen.

Cheers

DeVicious wrote:


Let’s get to the bottom of this and optimize it.

 

  1. Does that happen with all the themes that have local backdrops?
  1. did this happen with MY movie sheets… (my demo in example)
  1. what is the file size of the thumbnail and the movie sheet?
  1. when did you purchase your hub?
  1. is that on the internal HDD, an external or through network?
  1. is this happening on locally store backdrops or internet bacldrops
  1. are you connected to the internet?

 

here some things you might want to consider prior to using the Black Mamba theme.

delete the folder .miocrawler_cache, delete the thumbs folder and delete the individual .wd_tv folder (careful not the one with the themes) delete your media library and turn it off. Now unplug the power cord from the hub and restart without the media library on. I would bet it is way faster now, after that turn the library back on (if you really need it otherwise keep it off)

  1. Yes it happens with all themes using local backdrops

  2. Yes

  3. Average Thumbnail = 55KB / Movie Sheet = 45KB

  4. Purchase HUB about 1 year ago

  5. On both internal HD and NAS over wired gigabit network

  6. Happening on locally stored backdrops generated by latest version of Thumbgen

  7. Yes Hub is wired to router

Also I deleted thumb folders, cleared media library and deleted wdtv.cas2. There were no .miocrawler_cache folder but I did see it at one point months before. Turned off the media library. Unplug power cord, waited 5 minutes, and HUB booted up. Result was the same…5-6 seconds delay. It’d switch to black background within 1 second but the moviesheet itself takes another 4-5 seconds to show.

Only thing left I could think of is try pressing the reset buton on the Hub since I’ve never done that before, even after couple firmware upgrades.

Anything else you could think of? The only thing I really care abou the moviesheet is the imdb rating and info on the file like video/audio bitrate. I changed the movie sheet to contain only those info with black background. The actual movie synopsis/year/actors/etc are text within the movie.xml file so those come up within 1 second…just the imdb rating and other stuff lags behind.

Hi Hypertrophy…

I think the last part summed it up, as basically you modded the moviesheet to a black background it will of course prolong the delay in your mind compared to the wow effect of a full moviesheet

No offence meant just that if you have 2 boxes with the same delay, one has full screen moviesheet and the other a blank black background with just the imdb info, the wait will ‘feel’ longer to you as you are actively waiting for the imdb to show…

I hope that makes sense, basically you are not doing anything wrong …

YES there is a delay in moviesheet showing be it 1 second or 2 seconds or even 5 seconds, just the way the Hub loads the backdrop

Hope that helps…

hypertrophy wrote:


  1. On both internal HD and NAS over wired gigabit network

not that it would matter but the hub can only go to 10Mbit/s

hypertrophy wrote:

    • *Also I deleted thumb folders, cleared media library and deleted wdtv.cas2. There were no .miocrawler_cache folder but I did see it at one point months before. Turned off the media library. Unplug power cord, waited 5 minutes, and HUB booted up. Result was the same…5-6 seconds delay. It’d switch to black background within 1 second but the moviesheet itself takes another 4-5 seconds to show.

 

Only thing left I could think of is try pressing the reset buton on the Hub since I’ve never done that before, even after couple firmware upgrades.

 

Anything else you could think of? The only thing I really care abou the moviesheet is the imdb rating and info on the file like video/audio bitrate. I changed the movie sheet to contain only those info with black background. The actual movie synopsis/year/actors/etc are text within the movie.xml file so those come up within 1 second…just the imdb rating and other stuff lags behind.

You could hit the reset button it won’t delete stuff but i doubt it’s doing any good.

the.miocrawler folder should be there coz that’s where it is caching the movie sheets. Maybe your pc doesn’t show hidden system folder, you can activate that.

In my theme the snyposis and such doesn’t show prior to other ifno since it is hardcoded into the moviesheet

It would strike me as impossible that my theme and my demo take that amount of time since it is clearly faster here on my device. Our devices are about the same age, same firmware. the one thing we didn’t check (probably the most important) are the photo settings, 2 pages back i posted a screenshot how to setup, please check if you have the same settings there, load my theme, my demo folders (on your local drive on the hub) and test again please

extremedigital wrote:

Hi Hypertrophy…

 

I think the last part summed it up, as basically you modded the moviesheet to a black background it will of course prolong the delay in your mind compared to the wow effect of a full moviesheet

 

 

No offence meant just that if you have 2 boxes with the same delay, one has full screen moviesheet and the other a blank black background with just the imdb info, the wait will ‘feel’ longer to you as you are actively waiting for the imdb to show…

 

I hope that makes sense, basically you are not doing anything wrong …

 

YES there is a delay in moviesheet showing be it 1 second or 2 seconds or even 5 seconds, just the way the Hub loads the backdrop

 

Hope that helps…

    • *> Hi extremedigital,> the reason I modified the background to black is to reduce the jpg size thinking it’d make the load time be quicker but it didn’t make much of a difference. But yeah I know what you mean about the mind trick.> I’ve modified the movie sheet this way so I can at least get the movie synopsis right away and just have to wait a bit longer for the imdb rating/etc to show up…trying to get the best of both world :slight_smile:

DeVicious wrote:


You could hit the reset button it won’t delete stuff but i doubt it’s doing any good.

the.miocrawler folder should be there coz that’s where it is caching the movie sheets. Maybe your pc doesn’t show hidden system folder, you can activate that.

In my theme the snyposis and such doesn’t show prior to other ifno since it is hardcoded into the moviesheet

It would strike me as impossible that my theme and my demo take that amount of time since it is clearly faster here on my device. Our devices are about the same age, same firmware. the one thing we didn’t check (probably the most important) are the photo settings, 2 pages back i posted a screenshot how to setup, please check if you have the same settings there, load my theme, my demo folders (on your local drive on the hub) and test again please

 

I tried the photo setting that you provided and with the Slideshow Transition set to Fade the load time is actually slower…about 10 seconds vs 5 or 6 with it set to Normal.

I’ll try looking for the .miocrawler folder again and delete it to see if that makes any difference and possibly doing a hard reset too. Thanks for looking into this issue DeVicious!

I’ve attached a picture of the modified moviesheet with just the rating and bitrate info and black background. File size is only 42KB which should be small enough for quick loading time. The rest of movie info from the xml file would be inside the rectangular box, and below the box would be 2 rows of 8 movie thumbnails.

i have tuned of media library… and set the photo setting to Normal/Normal… and phew my TV Shows now show up in the right order.

what seems to happen is once you select a movie…

  1. the previous M/S is cleared…

  2. 1 to 1 1/2 seconds  later screen goes solid black,

  3. mirror effect is redrawn.

  4. second later the screen goes solid greyish black

  5. 1/2 to second later the selected M/s is drawn.

it is very visible each of the above steps… which is why is looks slow. 

Steps 2 to 4 i wonder if there is some control at the theme level… it clear the code to do the mirror effect must be running first before the screen goes grey and finally the movie sheet appear.

maybe at this stage it down to the Hubs Photo displaying routine and we’re stuck.

hypertrophy wrote:


tings there, load my theme, my demo folders (on your local drive on the hub) and test again please

 

    • *I’ve attached a picture of the modified moviesheet with just the rating and bitrate info and black background. File size is only 42KB which should be small enough for quick loading time. The rest of movie info from the xml file would be inside the rectangular box, and below the box would be 2 rows of 8 movie thumbnails.

 

The image doesn’t show until it is approved, maybe use a photo upload service,

this will be very interesting to see because you are referring to 16 thumbnails which implies it it is not in gallery view whis is the mode you use to trigger movie sheets. Please upload your image here  http://imageshack.us/ to confirm that we are talking about the same thing here.

i have tuned of media library… and set the photo setting to Normal/Normal… and phew my TV Shows now show up in the right order.

The weirdest things seem to happen on your hub, never in the last 6 months I had my screen go black twice. From all I know if everyone is using the same firmware and fairly indetical hardware there should be fairly the same behavior.

i have tuned of media library… and set the photo setting to Normal/Normal… and phew my TV Shows now show up in the right order.

The photo settings are 1) are not ideal and  2) have nothing to do with the sorting order. You should set the transition to Fade as it takes the same time to load the entire moviesheet but looks smoother. 

DeVicious wrote:



The image doesn’t show until it is approved, maybe use a photo upload service,

this will be very interesting to see because you are referring to 16 thumbnails which implies it it is not in gallery view whis is the mode you use to trigger movie sheets. Please upload your image here  http://imageshack.us/ to confirm that we are talking about the same thing here.

try this url http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/36/indianajonesandthekingdz.jpg

Just to clarify this particular movie sheet did not come from your theme but rather a simplified one I created in trying to increase loading time. Since I’m not at home I don’t have a screen shot with the actual gallery view with all the 16 thumbnails shown. I’ll upload the picture once I get home tonight. But this moviesheet is currently being used in a modified theme in gallery view mode.

hypertrophy wrote:


try this url http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/36/indianajonesandthekingdz.jpg

 

Just to clarify this particular movie sheet did not come from your theme but rather a simplified one I created in trying to increase loading time. Since I’m not at home I don’t have a screen shot with the actual gallery view with all the 16 thumbnails shown. I’ll upload the picture once I get home tonight. But this moviesheet is currently being used in a modified theme in gallery view mode.

okay here is the deal :wink:, you are referring to 16 thumbnails 8 rows per row in 2 rows. My Theme has 7 thumbnails in one row, plus mirror effect. This is probably what you should of mentioned to begin with, on top of that I am trying to help you guys to optimize your entertainment with my theme. If you have a problem with someone elses theme you should deal with the creator not with me and certainly not in this thread. I am absolutely and 1,000,000,000% sure you don’t have to wait 10 seconds with my theme by fading in the backdrop. If that really happens go to the store and replace your device because it would be 400% slower as on my live hub. I am happy to accept 100% more time  which would be 4 seconds max, If the theme you are referring to is keeping all the original code with background graphics for each thumbnail and other stuff I am not surprised it takes that long. I do not take responsibility for other peoples movie sheets or xml code of any kind nor will I further comment on it in this thread.

Here is what we gonna do to determine the issue… you load my theme and my movie sheets from the demo folder. You point your cell phone on your TV and upload it to you tube if the behavior is still sleepy slow I’ll help your to get on the bottom of this, if it works in the desired fashion the issue is resolved.

SPEED TEST - CELL PHONE VIDEO

Devicious,

sorry my fault i didn’t mean to imply the photo setting fixed my TV Sort order… that was part of turning off Library mode.

Nice idea about uploading a video so here is mine… seems it got a little faster.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQZrwUJAf_k

It not that bad, i am using your theme as-is… 

Anyway thanks and for me i’ll let you get on with something else.

I have given up on using this theme. It’s not the theme that frustrated me it’s the Hub. Because it want’s to display the 1st .jpg file it finds as the cover art I end up with _sheet file as cover art. I can remedy this using MoJo by simply changing the jpg extension to png. (from folder.jpg to folder.png)  but because Mamba uses 2 _sheet files and one of them is a .png I can’t get it working right on my Hub. I wish WD would finally fix this problem. Its a shame because I really liked this theme a lot. :frowning:

Kazgor wrote:

Devicious,

 

sorry my fault i didn’t mean to imply the photo setting fixed my TV Sort order… that was part of turning off Library mode.

 

Nice idea about uploading a video so here is mine… seems it got a little faster.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQZrwUJAf_k

 

It not that bad, i am using your theme as-is… 

 

Anyway thanks and for me i’ll let you get on with something else.

 

Hey you made your own sheets and they look great :smiley: 2.8 seconds so that is a lot better as yesterday.

Now those WD people just need to speed up the process and we can make a bbq :slight_smile:

flhthemi wrote:

I have given up on using this theme. It’s not the theme that frustrated me it’s the Hub. Because it want’s to display the 1st .jpg file it finds as the cover art I end up with _sheet file as cover art. I can remedy this using MoJo by simply changing the jpg extension to png. (from folder.jpg to folder.png)  but because Mamba uses 2 _sheet files and one of them is a .png I can’t get it working right on my Hub. I wish WD would finally fix this problem. Its a shame because I really liked this theme a lot. :frowning:

 

It seems you didn’t follow the thread then,

i have posted a couple of times that there was something wrong with the thumbgen screen shots

The Extra Sheet is supposed to refer to “Movie Thumb - Black Mamba by DeVicious”…

change that in the movie sheet settings and you have nothing to worry about.

here is the you tube video showing your theme where it takes about 6 seconds for the background to show up.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpIhr51fG1k&context=C406fddcADvjVQa1PpcFMTwG7bulB0eoazkuU5JGa037tCRw8sI_M=

With the modified moviesheet I was just trying to show that even though the size is small with little info it still takes a long time to load. Wasn’t trying to get you to help me fix my own personal theme/moviesheet…just showing that it happens with other ones too. Sorry if I gave you the wrong impression.

oh btw after just posting that youtube video I did a hard reset with the button on bottom of the hub and it’s faster…down to 4 seconds from 6 seconds.

Hi, DeVicious, thought you my like to see how this wonderful theme looks on the SMP (don’t know why camera icon is showing in middle of screenshot).

Once again thaks

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hypertrophy wrote:

here is the you tube video showing your theme where it takes about 6 seconds for the background to show up.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpIhr51fG1k&context=C406fddcADvjVQa1PpcFMTwG7bulB0eoazkuU5JGa037tCRw8sI_M=

 

With the modified moviesheet I was just trying to show that even though the size is small with little info it still takes a long time to load. Wasn’t trying to get you to help me fix my own personal theme/moviesheet…just showing that it happens with other ones too. Sorry if I gave you the wrong impression.

thank you so much for posting this video, it takes 6 seconds indeed in your video which is way too long but still better as the projected 10 seconds. You said it came down to 4 seconds eventually which is something I can live with for now even when it is still not ideal. In the meantime I got 3 more videos from other users and 3-5 seconds seems to be the average. Optimizing the Jpg is not going to speed it up unfortunately, the delay is based on the photo slide show application to kick in. You could test it and make a ridiculously large 1080p jpg file and it would not make a significant difference. It’s just how WD decided to trigger the backdrops, frankly it is a lame idea to begin with… but hey there been times where you couldn’t do this at all so we are moving into the right direction and can have the newest firmware at the same time.