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Author Topic: Podcast art cache  (Read 5912 times)

Dr.Flay

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Podcast art cache
« on: December 02, 2019, 10:02:17 PM »
Can the Podcast art please be saved to the podcast folder then used as cached artwork ?
Tick box option for using cached or fresh, per podcast.

Rationale and example:
Many podcasts have the 1 picture used for the main pic and the individual podcasts (most BBC podcasts).
Many podcasts have a main artwork and individual art per podcast.

I may have a constant connection but after 40gb my speed is reduced to 300kb during the day.
Often this means when I click on a podcast it takes up to 30 seconds saturating my DL with the artwork (crappy over sized images are not your fault or mine, but we suffer).
This means I have to wait 30 seconds before I can start listening.

Please can we have an option to use local art instead ?
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dro

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Re: Podcast art cache
« Reply #1 on: December 05, 2019, 12:16:15 AM »
Am sure I said I'd get around to looking into this on discord. Though the display of the artwork in the info shouldn't be stalling the UI (sounds like that from the later part of your post) unless I'm missing something from my testing. The alternative option is to check the option on the Podcasts preference page to not have it show the artwork



The key things that I'm not sure about & is why it's not been actively looked into doing this yet is how to detect when the artwork has changed (stale artwork is bad) & where its best to keep the cached artwork copy (with commonly having per-episode artwork, a cache folder could grow quite large).

For the first aspect I'd need to see if there's anything hinted at in the web response when first getting the image to know how long it's deemed as valid before re-requesting it. Otherwise I don't know if it makes sense to just update it when updating the feed in general.

For the second aspect other than trying to leverage the artwork from the downloaded episode file (if that's happened yet), it'd have to mirror the main feed image handling (assuming any of that is viable for the request) & just dump it into a cache folder until/if it's then embedded in the downloaded episode file subject to support to do that.

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Dr.Flay

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Re: Podcast art cache
« Reply #2 on: December 08, 2019, 07:39:13 AM »
The reason it stutters and stalls isn't due to a multitasking problem, rather it is because when clicking on a podcast section the first thing it does is start fetching the art.
While I am on 300kb (note kb not kB) this can max out my available bandwidth until finished.
The fastest images take about 5 seconds to download and the slowest around 30 seconds.

Like many others pay for my data and having to re-download a bulky unoptimised image over and over is not wanted.
Yes I can switch it off, but then go with out the artwork even if it has previously downloaded.

Why not just have it behave like albums, so if artwork is found in the folder it shows that?
What if we want to have it display own custom artwork, or preferred images sourced from the podcast site etc. ?
We can do that with albums, so why not podcasts ?
Art chosen by the user placed in the folder should override what the podcast wants to show.
That way users can also happily live with podcast art switched off, yet see art when actually playing a file if none was supplied.

Looking at podcasts in the media lib that have both series art and episode art, it seems to be able to tell the difference already.
In the media library we see the art that doesn't change (the one that should be cached), and when you DL an episode you get the episode art.

Should the series art ever be changed for some reason, deleting the local copy could then let WACUP know you want new art next time you select the feed.
At the very least the image can be cached for this session so navigating around the podcasts does not result in repeated downloads of the same image within minutes or seconds of last being displayed.
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dro

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Re: Podcast art cache
« Reply #3 on: December 12, 2019, 11:04:19 PM »
The podcast view is not like the local library views - I just pass a simple HTML blob to the IE based browser & it's left to get & render things as needed & this is one more reason why I really would prefer not having any browser aspect as part of WACUP as I can't cleanly display things but am at the mercy of how whatever engine being used wants to work. There are means to pass the image data (if present via the existing artwork service) in as part of the HTML blob but it wasn't implemented from the start as the artwork handling support coming from Winamp's core & associated input plug-in had issues (and still does for MP3 based files until that's completely replaced).

My suggestion to disable the display is purely there as a temporary workaround to alleviate the issue being seen until a solution is implemented as unless it's part of the downloaded episode file (as the local library view uses) then it's a web request without any knowledge of the local file info.

That is why I was saying about doing things akin to local files & how artwork is managed for that but due to the dynamic nature of feeds, it needs to account for external changes as that is what will happen & people will get annoyed if it then shows the wrong artwork. But like I also noted, I don't know without actually looking into it what sort of cache life information I'm going to get back from the feed to help manage keeping things current which is for the overall image & not the per-episode aspect since that would have to be tagged (which is another issue as that doesn't work correctly).



tl;dr - temporarily disable artwork, something will be sorted that tries to use local copies depending on how the embedded IE wants to work & embedded browsers are an evil I really could do without (or people formatting information for feeds consistently which ain't going to happen...).

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dro

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Re: Podcast art cache
« Reply #4 on: December 17, 2019, 04:51:08 AM »
Well I thought I'd do my Sunday night R&D session today & have a quick look into this & that's all I've spent the day doing *shrugs*

The next beta build will have an initial implementation that will create & use folder.<image_type> for the feed artwork - there will be no options, no handling for feed items doing their own thing & it's purely to see if all of the changes that have been needed to get it working do actually work. If they do then it can be refined later on but I've spent more time on this then I should have done so something will be better than nothing for the time being.

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