PapaLazarou

I'm sure there's a bug in Vista Media Center, it's not a just a DRM issue.

I've disabled all downloading of media information in WMP, deleted all the
hidden Album Art jpegs manually from my music folders and started afresh,
putting a single 500x500 folder.jpg image in each album. After I refreshed
the Media Player library, it saw this new high-res art with no problems.
Under the Now Playing tab in WMP, I have a 500x500 image displaying for every
single track.

However, if I run Media Center, it initially showed the placeholder
'musical-note' image for each album until I reached the Play Album / Play
Song page. Then my 500x500 image appears. If I play Track 1, the Now
Playing page enlarges the art, and it looks great. Then I exit back to the
album menus or 'Wall of Album Art' and the placeholder musical note is
replaced by a low-res version of my 500x500 image. This is also looks fine
on the wall. But if I go back into the Now Playing page and try Track 2,
sometimes the 500x500 image displays, but for most albums the horrible
low-res image appears again, enlarged and ugly. And worse still, some of the
tracks don't even show the low res image - they show the enlarged placeholder
musical note!

And yet, with some albums (that I've set up exactly the same - a single
500x500 folder.jpg in the album folder, nothing else) Media Center manages to
display the high-res image on every single track, as it should. Why is it so
inconsistent?

The only way I can get all the tracks in Media Center to display album art
is to paste a jpeg directly into Media Player but then, as we know, it
resizes everything to 200x200. Which is just horrible on the enlarged Now
Playing page. Strangley enough, after Media Player resized some of my
images, Media Center still displays the lovely high-res image on the first
few tracks of some albums.

It's so weird - I can't work it out!

"Dale" wrote:

> This has been the topic of many heated threads in the WMP newsgroups -
> mostly led by me.
>
> The bottom line is that even though the whole Folder.jpg behavior is a
> Windows Explorer feature, the Windows Media Player product team has co-opted
> that feature in your media library and feel it is their right to replace
> your Folder.jpg with their own at will.
>
> Additionally, they limit your album art size to a maximum of 200x200 pixels
> for the stated reason of providing compatibility with some unnamed portable
> device that may or may not have even have ever been built and that you most
> likely do not own. Then, when larger album art is needed, such as in the
> album art view of MCE, the 200x200 pixel art is stretched to something
> around 380x380 pixels completely distorting the image.
>
> Should you ever run across the unnamed device that limits all users of WMP
> on all other devices including huge computer monitors to 200x200 pixels, you
> can about be certain that it won't work with WMP 11 (not even my real
> AXIM-30 purchased in August 2004 works with WMP 11) but you can be
> absolutely sure that it won't be the size of the album art that stops it
> from working.
>
> To replace your own private property with their own and without giving the
> user any warning or notification that it was going to do so, and no way to
> opt out, and not even create a backup first is, in my opinion, illegal and
> is definitely a malware type of behavior. You could have spent many hours
> creating your own original artwork to put in a folder as Folder.jpg
> intending to use the long-documented Windows Explorer feature. There is no
> way that Windows Media Player can make any association between existing
> Folder.jpg and "album art". Your picture may have been anything you chose
> for it to be. For Windows Media Player to just wipe that work out is
> terrible!
>
> A couple weeks ago, a poster in the WMP newsgroups asked for advice using
> his own scanned images as album art in WMP. With good intent, someone
> suggested the OP copy his scanned images to his album folders and rename
> them Folder.jpg. My warning to the OP to backup first came just too late.
> By the time he saw my warning, he had destroyed many, but luckily not all,
> of his scanned images by simply naming them Folder.jpg and putting them in
> the album folders where WMP could destroy them. So, the first lesson for
> future readers of this, if it is not too late, is to backup your artwork
> first!!!
>
> Personally, I believe that the whole thing is nothing more than DRM. They
> appear to be assuming that any images you use are stolen - probably from
> some Internet site or other - and they are going to force what the record
> labels agree that you can use for album art. What a huge waste of computer
> technology - even on my 1280x1024 screen, a 200x200 pixel album art leaves
> 97% of my screen wasted in the Windows Media Player album art visualization.
>
> "Extracampine" <lostfrogg@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:%23dYiScFTHHA.1200@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
> > Windows Media Player 11 by default will try and retrieve album art
> > (folder.jpg) from the internet. If it finds it, it will overwrite any
> > pre-existing folder.jpg (even if the pre-existing one is a larger file) as
> > well as create an AlbumArtSmall.jpg file.
> >
> > Having this as a default option is foolish, as the program began to
> > overwrite my scanned-in high-resolution images with crappy low-resolution
> > ones. Realising this, I searched the options for a remedy to this.
> >
> > The tools/options/library tab enables the user to switch off various
> > "Automatic media information updates for files". Great, I thought.
> > However, despite this option being switched off, Media Player continues to
> > carry out this assault of my file organisation rather sporadically.
> >
> > Any ideas?
>
>