[Digikam-users] Digikam & video playback on OS X: solution

[Jens Benecke]

> Am 16.05.2015 um 10:48 schrieb Gilles Caulier <caulier.gilles at gmail.com>:
> 
> 2015-05-16 1:10 GMT+02:00 Jens Benecke <jens-digikam at spamfreemail.de>:
>> Hello everybody,
>> 
>> I was going to post a question regarding how to get video playback with Digikam going on OS X. I have been playing with it for a couple months and this was one of the loose ends I needed to tie up.
>> 
>> However, during writing of this post I stumbled on the answer by myself:
>> just install the „gstreamer1-gst-libav“ and „gstreamer1-gst-plugins-good“ Macports packages in addition to what the macports-install script in Digikam’s Git repository already installs. :-)
>> 
>> I hope it’ll help somebody! Maybe it can even be added as a dependency to Digikam’s Portfile.
> 
> Well, it's simple. Open a file in Macports bugzilla about to add the dependencies.

Done. https://trac.macports.org/ticket/47749

> I can add this dependencies into my macports scripts that i currently re-write in the way to make a bundle PKG. Please look here :
> https://projects.kde.org/projects/extragear/graphics/digikam/digikam-software-compilation/repository/revisions/master/entry/README.MACOSX
> https://projects.kde.org/projects/extragear/graphics/digikam/digikam-software-compilation/repository/revisions/master/show/project/macosx

Thanks! Will have a look.
I plan on using the PKG as a ’stable version’ of Digikam for daily use and probably a Macports compilation for experiments - possibly under a different user account, we’ll see. Or not at all, who knows. :)

>> Now I have one excuse less to get Digikam to replace iPhoto with my roughly 45’000 photos and 8000 video clips … ;)
> Another VERY important tips :
> 
> - Under OS X, open file limit is drop to 256, which is an horse compared to Linux (typically 65536). If you start digiKam to scan a huge collection, you will overload quickly this limit, and digiKAm will be unstable or crash. To fix this problem, all is explained here: http://docs.basho.com/riak/latest/ops/tuning/open-files-limit/

OK.

> - Under OS X, all KDE widget style are worse, excepted QtCurve which work like a charm. You must switch immediately to this king of style (Setup/Miscs digiKam config dialog), else GUI is unsuitable : Huge buttons, Fonts size not respected, worng color in GUI, etc. 

I did not have this problem when I compiled 4.10 from scratch. However, I had redraw problems that did not go away.
However, they did go away when I started digikam using "—graphicssystem=native“.

With QtCurve, however, the buttons overlaying the image in the preview window (next, pre, rotate, face tags) are not transparent as they were before. So they overlap some of the image always. Is it possible to change this?

> I will try to fix these problems automatically with PKG installer. I work on it since 2 weeks now with huge progress, but at usual, the last percents are hard to fix…

Great! :)

>> btw: is it possible to take advantage of the Macbook’s Retina resolution displays with Digikam?  If so, how? Digikam does not scale thumbnails or pictures to full Retina resolution here.
> 
> You can do it already. Go to Setup/Album View and turn on „Use large thumbnail size..." option. You will be able to have icon size of 512px max instead 256. You must rebuild all thumbnails through Maintenance tool of course.
> https://www.flickr.com/photos/digikam/17532145490/

It works, somewhat.

- Text, menus, JPEG previews and image editor images use Retina and display photos at the full screen resolution.
- PNG files, all thumbnails (no matter the zoom level), application icons and video files do not use Retina resolution - even not after using Maintenance and rebuilding all thumbnails like you described above.

It is not just about making thumbnails larger altogether, it is about providing more information to render for the screen since the DPI is 4x higher than before, while keeping the size of the thumbnail. 

I made some screenshots if you need but I think you know the issue … :)

Thank you!

-- 
Jens Benecke - jens at spamfreemail.de
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