Erratic behavior with album-art & Ogg files

[r_avital]

Hello all,
I searched and couldn't find this addressed in other posts.  First, the tech details:
Ubuntu Linux 10.10 Lucid
Using "Audex" for ripping (sort of a front-end to cdparanoia)
iPod Video (g5.5) 80gb.
Rockbox version on the ipod is 3.12 stable.
ALL album art for ogg files stored in /.rockbox/albumart
ALL album art files are named following the pattern AlbumArtist-AlbumTitle.jpg
ALL album art files are jpg.
ALL album art is 120x120px or smaller.

Long story short, some ogg files display the album art just fine, some never display it at all.

To test this, I kept things simple:

Made a folder named "abcde"
Made a subfolder below it named "fghij"
Put an ogg file in abcde/fghij/
Put album art in /.rockbox/albumart
Album art file is named "abcde-fghij.jpg"

Image will not display, no matter what.  No playlist involved either, I just went to File menu, selected abcde/fghij/mytrack.ogg which loads fine, no image.

And on some other ogg files, the above structure works flawlessly.

I even took an image that displays fine for a DIFFERENT ogg file, and renamed it abcde-fghij.jpg - This image, that displays just fine when track2.ogg plays, does not display at all when track1.ogg plays.  So it can't be the image, it has to be the ogg file.

I went as far as doing chkdsk on the device (connected to a Windows VM) and defragmenting (there was barely any fragmentation at all) - same results.

This seems to be random.  The images that do display, are also 120x120px but sometimes are even a little larger in byteage than the one that won't.  Byte-size of the image doesn't seem to be the issue.

If I can provide more details to help troubleshoot this, I will gladly do so.

It's not super-critical, because if I re-rip the same track as mp3 and embed the same image in it, it displays well (BTW, kudos for enabling that!).  It's just frustrating, because I would much rather use the ogg format.

Any thoughts, anyone?

TIA

[Lear]

The name of the folder where the .ogg is located in is irrelevant in this case. What matters are the tags "artist" (or "album artist", if present) and "album"; they need to match the file name exactly. If the tags contain some special characters, they need to be replaced with something else (see section C.2 in the manual for details). If either tag is very long, that'd probably cause some problems too (the total path to the album art file must be less than 260 or something like that).

[ravital]

Lear,

Thank you for your assistance, and sorry for the delay (my iPod was getting repaired).  I can confirm your instructions.  Works great.

Re- special characters, I've read the section you referred me to, and was relieved to find out that "special characters" does not mean foreign characters - I have a lot of French titles with accents, cedillas and such, those display fine as titles, but I have not yet tested with either album or artist tags with such accented characters.

Hope you'll forgive a pet peeve of mine, but since you're one of the developers:  One of the beauties of RockBox, is the fact that it is an Open Source product.  As such, I would hope that there eventually be support for .png images, as .png is (to the best of my knowledge) the Open Source equivalent of jpeg (which is proprietary).

That said, I love this product - RockBox was the only reason I decided to walk away from my trusted Creative Zen Xtra and get an iPod.  Great work.

Thanks again, and enjoy the weekend

Best regards

[saratoga]

Hope you'll forgive a pet peeve of mine, but since you're one of the developers:  One of the beauties of RockBox, is the fact that it is an Open Source product.  As such, I would hope that there eventually be support for .png images, as .png is (to the best of my knowledge) the Open Source equivalent of jpeg (which is proprietary).

PNG isn't really practical to support, and no, JPEG is an open standard.