A fast picture viewer for the Pi and XBMC?

Does anyone know if there is a fast picture viewer for the Pi that can be hooked up to XBMC? Trying to view my photo collection using XBMC is excruciating slow, but I know that the Pi GPU can render pictures really well as I have seen the Pi sample programs that can do this.

What we really need is a version of omxplayer but for photos. Does anybody know if there is a suitable Pi optimised program that can do this already? And how would one connect it up to XBMC? If there is not one already then maybe we should consider writing a program ourselves to improve the XBMC picture viewer experience. Does anybody know if anyone is doing some work on this? What is the best way to get started?

Thanks

Louis

Hi Louis,

I've been working a couple of days trying to figure out how to use the OpenMAX api for accelerated image decoding. I was able to get the image_decode component working by mimicking what was done in /opt/vc/src/hello_pi/hello_video. Here is the code:

https://github.com/cfavi/hello_viewer

The current code has several limitations:
1. I only tried JPEG
2. I wasn't able to display images larger than x1080. I'm under the impression that the decoder is working fine but the video_render component is not downsizing the images.

Best
Claudio

[dom]

1. I only tried JPEG
2. I wasn't able to display images larger than x1080. I'm under the impression that the decoder is working fine but the video_render component is not downsizing the images.

There is an image_resize component. XBMC uses it after the jpeg decode component, so you may get hints from the xbmc code.

Hi Claudio,

Your work here looks like it will be very helpful for me. I have a few questions:

- D you have any idea what modifications would need to be done to your code to make it decode a JPEG to a buffer instead of render to video (which is apparently what it is doing, I have not been able to try it out on my pi yet because I do not have a power cable).

- Is there documentation anywhere for how to use the ilclient API or did you just have to guess?

Hi Louis,

I've been working a couple of days trying to figure out how to use the OpenMAX api for accelerated image decoding. I was able to get the image_decode component working by mimicking what was done in /opt/vc/src/hello_pi/hello_video. Here is the code:

https://github.com/cfavi/hello_viewer

The current code has several limitations:
1. I only tried JPEG
2. I wasn't able to display images larger than x1080. I'm under the impression that the decoder is working fine but the video_render component is not downsizing the images.

Best
Claudio

@dom
thank you the work in xbmc is very useful.

@MattOwnby
For me it has been mostly guess work by looking that the /opt/vc/src/hello_pi/hello_video/ example and the OpenMAX IL spec at http://www.khronos.org/openmax/.

You can read the output of a compenent by using FillThisBuffer().

Check out xbmc image handling in
https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc-rbp/blob/m ... XImage.cpp

I guess that like me you're looking for an accelerated image decode. The only API I found for this is the OpenMAX... unless someone knows an alternative.

[dom]

One thing to be aware of is that progressive jpegs are not supported by the hardware.
You'll have to fall back to a slower software decoder like (on arm) for those.

Thanks to your help in this thread, I've successfully written a program to decode JPEG to a buffer. I'm very excited. I posted my finished product here:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=15463

I hope this can help someone. The XBMC source code along with the hello_viewer.c, ilclient.c, and OpenMAX official spec helped greatly.