Rhythmbox album art is blurred in notification bubbles

[ed10vi]

Album art as shown by Rhythmbox in Notify OSD is blurred. <http://launchpadlibrarian.net/25296199/red.png> This is probably because the art is being pre-scaled for the benefit of notification-daemon, before Notify OSD scales it a second time.

Rhythmbox should scale down the artwork only when sending it to notification-daemon, leaving it unscaled for other notification servers. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDevelopmentGuidelines#blurry>

(The equivalent problem with Banshee is bug 338695. Similar problems with other programs should be reported separately.)

[Nicolas Delvaux (malizor)]

Same thing here, and it's very annoying !

After some observations, I think it comes from a resize problem: the notification seems to allocate a static size for thumbnails, and those are automatically stretched to fill a kind of square → no consideration for the original size or even ratio of the thumbnail.

What is the point to have a new/beautiful/wonderful notification system if it's beauty is spoiled by this behavior ?
It's a shame.

(sorry for my English)

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

Malaria wrote:
> What is the point to have a new/beautiful/wonderful notification system if it's beauty is spoiled by this behavior ?
>
I do agree that the quality of resizing should not detract from the
styling and impression created by the notification system. Patches
welcome! Mirco, can you comment?

Mark

[Mirco Müller (macslow)]

notify-osd takes whatever it gets from rhythmbox/emesene. I have to take a closer look at these apps sourcecode, to see what size the image they pass to notify-osd.

[ed10vi (ed10vi86)]

It also occurs in pidgin.
I have 2 accounts, and I tired to send messages pidgin pidgin, emesene pidgin, and pidgin emesene, and the avatar appears blured
The apps logos like gnome-mplayer appears blured too, but this is more difficult to perceive

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

If Emesene and Pidgin are sending tiny bitmaps to Notify OSD, that's something that needs to be fixed in Emesene and Pidgin, in which case this should be a separate bug report for each of them. See <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDevelopmentGuidelines#blurry>.

[Tony Manco (trmanco)]

If you turn on Gwibber's bubbles, the icons displayed by notify-osd are also blurry...

[Åskar (olskar)]

In the case with buddyavatars (images with people) according to the people in #pidgin they are not resizing images before passing it on to notify-osd, that is the only size of image they got.

In the case with icons appearing blurred in the bubbles from pidgin, that is because they have no highres or scalable icon. That should be easily fixable from their part.

However the first problem is trixier since that image is all they get from the MSN servers so to speak and when making it bigger it looks blurred

[Arturo Torres Sánchez (r2d2.art2005)]

Thıs problem ısn't from Rhythmbox/Banshee/Emesene/Pıdgın/etc., because they provıde large enough pıctures. The problem ıs that the ıcons get scaled down and then rescaled up.

[ed10vi (ed10vi86)]

I also think that is problem of Notify-OSD, and not from the apps.
It would be strange that all the apps did things wrong

I think that Notify-osd should adapt to the standard, not to make his own standard (this is Microsoft)

This is only an opinion with not too much knowledge, I don't know how it works

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

obZen, we've had to fix many applications that misuse the standard and send actions regardless of notification server, so it's not surprising that we'd also have to fix some applications that pre-scale icons regardless of notification server. That's why we have development guidelines for this precise issue. The standard says nothing about the size of icons, so please avoid slurs and keep this bug report to facts that help fix the bug.

[ed10vi (ed10vi86)]

Ok. Sorry if I said something that offended someone
as I said, it was only an opinion without knowledge
it was strange for me that all the apps have the same issue, and in the old notification daemon not

[Mirco Müller (macslow)]

This image (-size/quality) passed to notify-osd for display is outside of the control of notify-osd.

[Victor Vargas (kamus)]

I try to reproduce this problem in Jaunty, rhythmbox 0.12.0, notify-osd 0.9.13 and works fine for me. I have attached a screenshot for your revision.

Regards

[Victor Vargas (kamus)]

I made a mistake in last message , I have attached a picture from rhythmbox notify system, not inside bubble of notify-osd. My apologies for that.

[Nicolas Delvaux (malizor)]

Notify-osd is very intolerant about size of covers.

On jaunty, it used to stretched all images to fill a kind of square, causing a natural blur effect on pictures with a different ratio.

Now, on Karmic, the basic problem is still there but covers which no fit the "ratio that have to be fit" simply doesn't appear anymore.

Of course, the standard cover format is ok but (I know I'm strange) I love having some home-made best-of albums with there home-made/ill-sized covers.

See the picture below for a more understandable explanation.

[Mirco Müller (macslow)]

Malaria, I don't know which version of notify-osd you tested that with, but with the last couple of releases of notify-osd your described bug is not reproduceable. See attached sample cover-images and screencast for proof.

Commands used to trigger the notifications with the sample cover-images:
notify-send "Kenny Larkin (300x300)" "Metaphor Soul Man" -i /tmp/test-cover-1.jpg
notify-send "Kenny Larkin (200x198)" "Metaphor Soul Man" -i /tmp/test-cover-2.jpg

I did that on Jaunty with notify-osd 0.9.18.

[Nicolas Delvaux (malizor)]

notify-osd 0.9.17-0ubuntu1 (no 0.9.18 on my up-to-date repositories)
Indeed, I have the same behavior than in your screencast with your commands.

At least, know we now that this is truly a bug in Rhythmbox ! (sorry for doubting of you, notify-osd)

Let me show you my screencast (I'm very proud of it, it's my first one !)

[Nicolas Delvaux (malizor)]

Today, simultaneous update of notify-osd (0.9.18) and rhythmbox (0.12.4), and this bug is still alive.

Is this an upstream bug (which have to be reported in bugzilla), or an ubuntu bug ? (I don't know, there was perhaps an ubuntu specific patch for notify-osd support ?)

I have downloaded sources of the rhythmbox package in the hope of helping, but I only managed to notice that I still have a lot to learn in C programming...

[Nicolas Delvaux (malizor)]

I strongly disagree with the « whishlist » importance of this issue.
This IS a bug, Rhythmbox have to display covers through notify-osd, whatever there ratio.

Rhythmbox is the default music-manager for Ubuntu, I think it's a shame that it is not even fully integrated with notify-osd.

[Steve Dodier-Lazaro (sidi)]

This issue has been quite discussed already (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/notify-osd/+bug/393797).

If the image given to notify-osd is large enough then it will render as sharply as possible. If you are willing to write a resize algorithm that is more efficient than the current gtk ones, then I thank you in advance. Otherwise the only thing to do is to have large covers.

There is nothing particular that the notify-osd / rhythmbox / banshee / exaile / any other player developers can do about that. They should just not resize the cover themselves unless they know the notification daemon will not and unless they explicitely want to control the cover size.

[Nicolas Delvaux (malizor)]

Well, in fact it's not anymore a resize issue (see from comment 16).

It's true that the title of this bug is not relevant anymore (at least for Karmic) but It makes me think that this is perhaps not the same bug...
I though that the core of those bugs (blurred covers on Jaunty & no display of no-square covers on Karmic) was the same, but I may be wrong.

What do you think ?

Should I open a new bug report for this ?

[Steve Dodier-Lazaro (sidi)]

It is definately two different problems. The bubbles can't be less blur than
they are in the exemple files shown by Mirco at the end of the bug report I
posted in my previous comment.

About your icons not appearing when they are not square, I am not sure if it
is the actual issue. I remember some album art not working in Exaile with a
development version of notify-osd, but the issue vanished without me being
able to find how to reproduce it.

[Nicolas Delvaux (malizor)]

Merci Steve ;)

I opened bug #426256 for this issue.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

I've sent this upstream at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=594516 to grab comments from the rhythmbox developers about the issue. Thanks all.

[Vish (vish)]

This bug has been fixed in notify-osd > Bug #393797
The album art are clearer now.

[Chris Wilson (notgary-deactivatedaccount)]

This was "Fix released" a while ago. Is the fix in Ubuntu yet?