[mythtv-users] The PNG Thumbnail generated by Default: Is it used for anything?

[Michael T. Dean]

On 05/13/2007 09:08 PM, Brad DerManouelian wrote:
> On May 13, 2007, at 4:57 PM, Douglas Wagner wrote:
>>      So i'm trying to clean up my installation a bit and of course  
>> have come across all the PNG thumbnails that are generated (not  
>> sure if it's by Myth or my capture card [pcHDTV3000])
>>
>> Anyway, are those thumbnails good for anything?  Do things not work  
>> if you don't have them?
> Myth creates them. There's a setting in the frontend to create them  
> so you can see a still preview in the Watch Recordings screen. If you  
> set it to display video instead of a still, you don't need them.  
> Also, MythWeb uses these (and will create them if they don't exist)  
> on the Recorded Programs page. It won't hurt if you delete them, but  
> they will come back if you don't turn off the setting or you hit that  
> page in MythWeb.

The setting is:

Display thumbnail preview images of recordings
If enabled, a static image of the recording will be displayed on the 
"Watch a Recording" menu.

and has nothing to do with whether they're created--only whether they're 
displayed.  Short of hacking the code, you cannot stop the creation of 
these thumbnails.  We create them so that they're available /if/ they're 
ever needed because doing so doesn't hurt anything.

In other words, it should not be an issue.  On my system
ls -l /path/to/recordings/dir/*.png |
awk '{size += $5} END { print size }'

gives 14679003bytes = 14MiB (almost exactly--13.998988151550 or so)

ls -l /path/to/recordings/dir/*.{nuv,mpg} |
awk '{size += $5} END { print size }'

gives 1.658574e+12 bytes = 1544.67GiB = 1.5TiB

So, while I have 1.5TiB of recordings, my thumbnail images take up 14MiB 
(about 1/113000 of the space required for the recordings).  And because 
I'm using SVN trunk--wherein MythWeb creates its own separate thumbnail 
images (so I have 2 per recording)--I have 150% as much space used for 
thumbnails as would be used on 0.20 (the MythWeb images are about half 
the size of the frontend images).

Mike