So today my good friend Larry (aka: Larmo; ArcaneC5; Lawrence of Polesmokia) brought the iTunes photo cache kludge to my attention.
What iPod photo cache kludge you ask (as I did)? Well according to Google, no one is talking about this. According to Larry, everyone is too busy kissing Apple's ass. I believe them both.
Apparently the folks at Apple, in their infinite knowledge of how to create amazingly functional products decided to store each and every image uncompressed. Not once or twice, but four times.
That's right, each and every image on your iPod has four versions:
- The first thumbnail is 720x480 and in YUV 4:2:2 format, interlaced.
- The second thumbnail is 176x220 and in RGB 565 format.
- The third thumbnail is 42x30 and in RGB 565 with swapped bytes.
- The fourth thumbnail 130x88, RGB 565 with swapped bytes.
So when Larry took his 1,848 images and scaled them down to 640x480, he had about 130MB of JPG's sitting on his hard drive. After copying them to his iPod using iTunes, his cache folder for those pictures was a whopping 1.5GB! That's a 11.5x increase in size above and beyond his low-res 60kB source files - meaning each photo takes up about 800kB worth of thumbnails on his iPod for display to a silly 320x240 screen.
Maybe my brother was right. Long live the Zen Zune.
(ty ipodlinux.org)
2 comments:
Yes - this is incredibly annoying, and I cannot understand why there is not an option to prevent the folder from being stored on the hard drive - I don't mind the thumbnails being created as temporary files, but why can't you remove them afterwards?
Because iPod (read: mac) users are fearful of 'options'? Don't even put it in the UI Apple, bury it in some config file that only us uber-geeks can get to...
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