Suggestion for WPS

[JustinPM]

Seeing as how the new JPG viewer works so nice, was wondering on a scale of 1-10 how difficult you think it'd be to integrate that into the WPS system to display an album cover on the screen at the same time as the song info.  I can't believe how far Rockbox has gotten, it's 100 times better than the original iRiver stuff.  Keep up the good work!

*Edit*
Realized I might not have been the first to think of this, but really neglected to do a search.  If this has come up more than once, let me know so I can kill this thread.  All involved, sorry if I'm creating useless posts.

[kenshin]

Adding JPEG support to the WPS is not really a good idea. The JPEG viewer has to run the cpu at 120MHz to get more than the native 2 (B&W) or 4 (greyscale) colors. Adding this to the WPS will drain the juice in no time.

[Shebb]

What would be nice is if album art could come up by pressing a button or two from the WPS instead.  Then you get a nice big view of the cover and you don't have to drain away the power all the time.

However this would not work as of now.  The current jpeg viewer steals the audio buffer for its memory currently which stops all audio from running.  For smaller images like most album covers maybe the plugin could be adapted to take over the normal plugin buffer for its memory resource.  I will look at the source but I am not quite as good as the developers...

[kenshin]

I don't think there are many more key presses left (if any), really. I've got an iRiver 120 and all three side buttons are taken, the joystick click is taken (both long and short clicks) as are all the directionals on the joystick. The only thing left is record which might do something I'm not aware of...

[JustinPM]

Really good points.  Yeah, it's more an aesthetic thing than anything.  I can live without it.  I just got started with Rockbox two days ago and already I'm more impressed with this than any homebrew things I've seen lately.  To include the sheer amount of features include in this and still maintain functionality is most impressive.  Thanks RockBox community!

[Shebb]

Here is an update to the jpeg plugin:
http://www.geocities.com/henriksens2710/jpeg.htm
It now allows small images to be viewed whilst any audio is playing.  I think one way to view album art would be to press something like play+ab from the wps or something.  With play as a modifier more feypresses are possible.  The jpeg plugin would then loadup the file cover.jpg in the same folder as the currently playing song if it exists.

[kenshin]

ON (play) + A-B brings up the ID3 tags screen. Your best bet would be ON + a joystick click or ON + Rec. That's assuming you're using an iRiver. I don't have an Archos so I have no idea what the key bindings are on those players to know if there's any key combinations still free. Something else to consider is that not all the embedded JPEG images in MP3 tags are small. I have more a few with very large files (upwards of 1 meg) that would have to be downscaled just to fit in the available buffer, not to mention on the screen. I guess if you know your image is always small it makes sense but if you're like me you embed a high res image not a 100x100 thumbnail.

It also makes more sense to load the embedded APIC if one exists than to assume a filename "cover.jpg". I sure don't use that naming convention but I do embed the cover image. That means my Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files don't have embedded images so I'll never be able to use this feature as it is currently. I'm sure I'm not alone.

[amiconn]

FYI: the view-small-images-with-music playing hack won't work on the archos, because the plugin buffer is way too tiny for that. The plugin buffer size is 32 KB (RAM is a valuable resource on archos!), of which the jpeg plugin already takes ~25 KB. It's obviously impossible to fit grayscale buffer, compressed image and decoded image into the remaining 7 (!) KB. The grayscale buffer needs 28 KB on its own...

On a related note, it doesn't make any sense to me to embed images in tags. First, an mp3 or other audio file is supposed to contain audio data, and tags are supposed to contain information about the audio track. Everything else is a waste of resources. I don't count covers or the like as information about the track.

Just my $0.02

[kenshin]

On a related note, it doesn't make any sense to me to embed images in tags. First, an mp3 or other audio file is supposed to contain audio data, and tags are supposed to contain information about the audio track. Everything else is a waste of resources. I don't count covers or the like as information about the track.

I use it only because it is there. I actually don't rip files to MP3. I find most of the ID3 tags are completely useless. If it were never there, I would be just as content (after all, Ogg Vorbis doesn't have it and that's what I rip to).

[roolku]

Here is an update to the jpeg plugin:
http://www.geocities.com/henriksens2710/jpeg.htm
It now allows small images to be viewed whilst any audio is playing. 

Thanks a lot for the update! I love it.

Roolku

[nobby]

ami: i keep a cover.jpg in the same folder as the mp3. i dont tag this, and all  my software that i use for music works with this. i think this is the path rockbox should take. (cover art in WPS IS important to people, even more so when h3xx with its color lcd works.

[Bagder]

If you want this included in Rockbox, I would suggest that you make a patch out of it and add an entry about it in the patch tracker!

Seems like a neat feature to me.

[nobby]

like patches actually get commited before they stop working?

[Bagder]

Patches get in. Some of them just take a long time. Some are rejected.

[kenshin]

like patches actually get commited before they stop working?

Yes, they do.

My first patch was included within a couple days of being posted.
My second one hasn't been so fortunate...