FastPictureViewer and thumbnails in opus

Help & Support
1

Hi all.

I recently bought fastpictureviewer codecs pack.. Now i have support for image formats like EXR and HDR etc.. In explorer thumbnails for those formats are generated after installing the codecs pack.. But in opus they do not show up.
Does anyone have an idea why this might be.. I also have in preferences "use shell image extraction for formats opus dont know" ticked on.

I have the 64 bit version of the codec pack and running win7 x64.

Another quick question i have. Why does Opus generate thumbnails for jpg etc. slower than explorer. And I feel that thumbnails chached in explorer are not used in opus and vice versa. I open a folder with images and let opus generate thumbs then go in explorer to the same folder. And i looks like as if explorer doesn't use the cashed thumbs generated by opus.. And same thing goes for the vice versa. Anybody ideas on this?

Thanks in advance for your help.

2

It's possible that FastPictureViewer provides thumbnails via the newer method which Opus doesn't support yet. (The method was introduced in Windows Vista but virtually nothing used it until quite recently. Support for it will be added in Opus 10.)

For formats Opus (or an Opus plugin) understands directly, Opus (or its plugins) uses its own code to generate their thumbnails and does not share its thumbnail cache with Explorer. So if there is a speed difference it's because different code is being used to generate the thumbnails (or because they are cached in one program but not yet cached in the other).

(Also note that setting the Opus thumbnail cache to lossless mode can significantly increase the amount of time it takes to generate thumbnails for the first time, because the thumbnails are PNG compressed into the cache and PNG compression is rather slow. (PNG decompression is fast but compression is not.) Try turning off lossless caching, or turning off the cache entirely, to see if that helps with the speed of generating thumbnails for the first time.)

3

Thank you very much Leo..

I quickly experimented with some thumbnail settings.. Turning off cache entirely does seem to have a positive effect especially on small files. Thumbs are generated faster no doubt. But I also have folders with very large images and if they arent cached it will recalculate every time i go in a folder. So thats the downside of the solution.

Lossles compression is disabled by default so i didn't touch that. But I did disable "high quality image scaling" justnow and it looks like it speeds up the thumb generating a bit.

As for the EXR and HDR support.. Will opus support those natively(plug-in) or will it be compatible with the fastpictureviewer's code ?

And talking about fastpictureviewer.. The program loads images much faster than explorer or opus. Is that because of the 64 bit code?

4

An EXR/HDR plugin for Opus might be made at some point. (thread about that)

I don't know much about FastPictureViewer so I can't comment on that.

Opus and Explorer are both 64-bit as well so no, if their JPEG decoder is faster than others it's not because of 64-bit code.

5

Ok thanks for the explanation Leo.

Another thing I just ran into is the following.

The option "High quality image scaling" does also affect the Standalon Viewer. The downscaling of larger images results in aliasing.

Is there somehow a possibilty to disable "high quality image scaling" for thumbnails and exclude the Standalone viewer from this..

Or does the "high quality image scaling" not affect the thumbnail generation at all? As i previously said. It looks like thumbs are generated bit faster but I'm not sure of this.

6

I think the option does affect both thumbnails and the viewer. Unless you get a significant speed increase I would keep it turned on.

(The plan is to remove that option entirely, so it's effectively always on, too. 10 years ago it made sense but these days bilinear image scaling shouldn't cost much CPU/GPU power.)