Tips/Tricks to make the thumbnails and playlists load more quickly on devices

I remember a couple of years back when I was messing with a RaspPi Model B and Kodi that it made the art load much faster if I reduced poster size to 400x600 and I was wondering if there were any other tips or tricks that I could set in my library or on Mezzmo to speed up library display. Specifically for the FireTV and FireTV Sticks, both Gen 2.

My library is set up to only display playlists, most of them are Active Playlists. When I browse to a category it usually takes a minute or two for all of the titles and their respective thumbnails to load; I often have to sit and wait if the item I want to view is at the end of the list.

For Example, I have an Active Playlist for TV Shows. There are 119 different shows. When I pull it up using the Mezzmo App the first page will populate with the titles and then the thumbnails will follow in about 5 seconds. If I scroll to the right too quickly, I get the "Loading...." and green <working> arrows on the thumbnails and then the titles show up after about another 5-8 seconds, followed by the thumbnails a few seconds later. Let's say that it is sorted alphabetically and I want to watch an episode of the X-Files (at the end). I can scroll all the way to the end and watch the screen full of "Loading..." and the green <working> arrow but since everything populates in order, it might take more than a minute just to get the titles to load.... and then the thumbnails.

It seems that the pages for apps like NetFlix and Amazon Prime load much more quickly as I browse the content than does Mezzmo. The FanArt, especially, seems to be slow as molasses and there is some pretty good latency where I can switch to a different program or show and the FanArt from the previously viewed entry is still on the background and stays that way for a considerable amount of time.

Is this due to my thumbail art being too large? Many are 400x600 and none are greater than 1000x1500. I have also compressed them down so that nothing is more than 150kb and most are 100kb or less.

You could try editing the device profile for Conceiva Mezzmo (Android) and setting the size of the thumbnail to a smaller size:

<avcontainer id="jpeg" name="jpeg_tn" mimetype="image/jpeg" encode="1" baseline="1" dlnaprofile="JPEG_TN" preferredthumbnail="1" supportschunked="0">
<image>
<format id="jpeg" mimetype="image/jpeg" encode="1" codec="98" quality="2">
<maxdimensions width="320" height="320" />
<maxbits>24</maxbits>
</format>
</image>
</avcontainer>

Currently it is 320x320 so you could try 160x160 to see if this gives better performance. We will test here to see if we can find anything in the browse request that is slowing down the response times.

Couldn't you cache the thumbnails on the client to improve performance? It can be a little distracting when cycling through content as sometimes the thumbnails seem to dissapear momentarially, and then re-appear.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by icorrie

Couldn't you cache the thumbnails on the client to improve performance? It can be a little distracting when cycling through content as sometimes the thumbnails seem to dissapear momentarially, and then re-appear.

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That was kind of my question, too. I reduced thumbnail size but it didn't seem to make much difference. Does the size of the fanart/background make a huge difference?

The thumbnails are cached but only for the current session of the app, so for the first browse the app needs to retrieve the thumbnail and put it in the cache.

Something else you can try is to turn off folder artwork delivery in Device Settings in the Mezzmo server, go to 'Media Devices' and double-click the device and then on the Performance tab uncheck the box to deliver folder artwork.