I've been playing with the "Digital Album" on my new box. My results haven't been too great.

Full size images from my digital camera are (a) slow to copy, (b) slow to display and (c) a waste of space on the 9200 since they will have to be resized for display. Consequently, I've been resampling the images to 800x600 on my PC before copying them to the 9200.

The problem is that I'm not very happy with the quality of the images on the TV (either from the 800x600 images or when I use a full 2048x1536 image). My DVD player seems to do a much better job of rendering the images. Given that the 9200 can render and resize two MPEG2 streams simultaneously (PIP), I would have thought that good quality rendering of a JPEG ought to be child's play. Surely the quality of a displayed photo ought to be at least as good as the image from paused video?

Is there any particular resolution that would give better results? The poor quality of the image may be due to the resizing algorithms of the box, so images that do not have to be resized might be the way to go. Any ideas?

Has anyone else played with this? What did you think of the image quality? (I've found no comments on a search of this forum.)

Cheers,

Sean

The MPEG decode is done by a piece of silicon designed by experts over several years for the job, I suspect the JPEG decode is done by a software library that is both slow and does a crap job maybe (just guessing) cos it's rendering to the OSD graphics plane and is limited to 256 colours or something??

You *could* try resizing the images to 720x576 as this is a "telly friendly" pixel ratio - but I doubt it's going to help much.

Cliff

I'll have a play with seeing what the same photos look like on the PC with reduced colour depth - the corruption that I saw on the TV is consistent with your suggestion.

If this box is to be used as a photo gallery then it needs to do a lot better than the results that I've had. I suppose that one approach would be for the PC-side software to convert the JPEGs into single-frame MPEGs that can be fed to the hardware decoder. This would need a lot of development effort from Humax.


I may try this but I suspect that you have hit the nail on the head with the colour depth.

Cheers,

Sean

Sean,

There's got to be PC apps (probably Freeware/GPL ones to boot) that already can do the JPEG to frames of an MPEg thing for you. But this will just build a "slideshow", not individual pictures you can call up from a file browser.

Seems to me that both the JPEG and MP3 features are "hey, let's add a few more tick boxes to the feartures list" items than seriously implemented features.

For both JPEG and MP3 you'd be FAR FAR better off with a wi-fi streamer that just used UPnP to show/play the collection on your PC or network file server.

Cliff

I have to agree. Shame though!


Again, you're quite right. However, it does seem a pity not to be able to use the box with a hard drive in it that already sits in my front room connected to my TV and stereo.

On the other hand, maybe your idea would be further justification for the NSLU2 unit that I've bought to turn my USB HDD into a network file server! Wouldn't have to be wireless - there are a couple of ethernet ports by the TV.

Cheers,

Sean

I was thinking that if each JPEG was converted into an MPEG (as can be done for things like the wallpapers on hackable DVD players) then a suitable modification of the 9200 software (by Humax) would allow these to be viewed via the hardware decoder. This might mean just using a file browser rather than thumbnails to launch the images but I don't see that as a problem.

(To clarify, there would be an MPEG for each JPEG. I "had" to do this to customise the menus and splashscreens on my old Scan DVD player.)

By the way, has anyone found out what hardware is inside the box? It would be interesting to see what the potential capabilities are.

Cheers,

Sean

Nope I keep asking that but folks who've been inside (even taken photos) report/show that the main silicon is beneath a large (un-movable) heatsink so it's not possible to read the chip designation. My guess is NEC "Emma" though.

BTW If you are thinking of an NSLU2 then I guess you know that "TwonkyVision" makes a great UPnP server to run on it?

Cliff

This should have plenty of power to do the JPEG decode - even more likely that the problem with photos is the colour depth on the overlay that is being used.

The blurb that I've read about EMMA suggests that it wouldn't be too much of a leap to modify the hardware and software to support ethernet. Perhaps this will be in the next box from Humax.


That's my next little project!

Will just be using a WMP client to test the installation until I can get the wife to authorise purchase of a media streaming client box. Any suggestions as to a good forum for reviews of media streaming clients?

Cheers,

Sean

Hats off to you if you persuade WMP to stream from a UPnP server. In typical Microsoft fashion they "go their own way" on network streaming and how to identify and connect to servers.

You may have more luck using VLC from www.videolan.org though.

Cliff

Thanks for the tip. I was planning to use the WMP plug-in from on2share (http://www.on2share.com/UPnP/index.p...d=13&Itemid=28)

I'll let you know if I have any success!

Cheers,

Sean