Picturalizer

Post by **eclectic-tech** » March 3rd, 2016, 12:35 am

After seeing a solution by Balala concerning visuzlizer and album cover art I explored using imagecrop on other images...
Picturalizer is the result.

[ Direct Link ]

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P1.jpg

UPDATED! Current Version 1.2016.05.17

3 variants are included in the package: 'Random', 'Desktop', & 'BarImage'

The 'Desktop' skin will load by default; right-click and select 'Custom skin actions', 'Configure' to set the PicturePath and bar path variables. Click 'Apply & Exit' to refresh the skin.

Each will display full-color portions of the image as bars for the audio visualizer. When no audio is playing, full-color images will be displayed (if backgrounds are not hidden), thus, they could double as Gallery Viewers, or a Wallpaper Changer based on the ChangeRate timer.

The 'BarImage' variant is designed to display images re-sized to your desired dimension; I include sample images in the skin package.

Click below to view 'Music' BarImage preview:

music.gif

A grey-scaled, semi-transparent, scaled copy of the image is set behind, with a solid-colored background behind that to cover any current wallpaper. Both are optional. Scroll the mouse to change the background-bar contrast.

The number of bars (20~160 or 'custom') can be set in the 'Configure' skin. The gap is adjustable to maximum of 1/2 the bar width. Access the 'Config' skin via a middle-click or from the context menu. The 'Picturalizer' title, Auto-Change mode, border, invert, bars/bands, etc. can be toggled from the context menu.

Larger images will use more CPU cycles, so re-sizing all to a lower resolution is one possible solution. (Removed full-screen as of version 1.2016.04.10... no current solution for excess CPU load). If you set the 'bar path' variable to a folder with full screen images, it can be used full screen, but be aware that this will use more CPU cycles.

:: History ::
Version 1.2016.05.17
Modified Bands: Full-size bands responds to freq volume level
Added Scaler: 1/4, 1/8, and 1/16 of screen width images
Added custom number of band setting (2~160)

Post by **eclectic-tech** » March 4th, 2016, 1:03 am

Added missing imagesize plugin (doh!) Click image to animate...

picturalizer2.gif

Changed formula for more consistent gap and image alignment.
Considering a version that re-sizes image to user chosen scale... but that would require including a large executeable to do that.

Set the path to your images in the @Resources\settings.inc file.

Post by **eclectic-tech** » March 4th, 2016, 9:41 pm

Changes:

Added switch to full-color image when no sound
Added image auto-change mode; control through context menu, set time in settings.inc
Switched to WORKAREA rather than SCREENAREA (Desktop friendly)
Cleaned up some code...

First post updated

Post by **eclectic-tech** » March 5th, 2016, 5:08 pm

Version 0.2016.03.05
Added smaller 'centered' version
Reduces CPU use by over 50% versus the original full-image

Details and Link in first post updated.

Post by **eclectic-tech** » March 9th, 2016, 11:10 pm

Released Version 1 (see first post)

Post by **eclectic-tech** » March 12th, 2016, 6:24 pm

Updated Picturalizer

Added fourth variant 'BarImage' that uses sized images for the bars (I used 1920x400 & 1920x200 but any size will work)

I attached two images (water.png & music.png) to the first post for you to try in the new variant

sesheron · Post by **sesheron** » April 1st, 2016, 5:59 pm

Oh wow am I loving this. Fed it my massive wallpaper folder, set to full screen and went to town.

But yea, it is destroying my cpu. 8-12% I found that changing the number of bands doesn't really affect the processor or ram usage. Even when there is no music and the image goes "regular" the cpu stays at 10%.

Post by **eclectic-tech** » April 2nd, 2016, 2:31 am

sesheron wrote:Oh wow am I loving this. Fed it my massive wallpaper folder, set to full screen and went to town.

But yea, it is destroying my cpu. 8-12% I found that changing the number of bands doesn't really affect the processor or ram usage. Even when there is no music and the image goes "regular" the cpu stays at 10%.

Thanks! Don't say I didn't warn you about using large images

Yeah, manipulating images is not something Rainmeter is designed for, so it is CPU intensive (especially full-screen).

The skin is cropping the image at a fairly high rate even, when not being driven by sound; that is the main CPU load.

Hiding the background image reduces the drain slightly (but the effect is not as 'visually pleasing'), and with that setting, the full color image will not appear when the sound level is zero.

I have tried several ways to minimize CPU load without much success. Using large images will always load down the CPU.

Creating some custom smaller images helps. I created several 1920x400 and 1920x200 images and use those with the 'BarMode' variant, which reduces the load.

Glad to hear you are having fun with it!

Post by **jsmorley** » April 2nd, 2016, 3:17 am

One hint I can give, and I have no idea if it is relevant to this...

Rainmeter is actually pretty good at large images or lots of images. UNLESS you are in any way resizing them with W and H (and perhaps cropping them as well, I have never really looked into that).

If you have an image that is being resized by Rainmeter, even by 1 pixel, then the full resize work is done on EVERY skin redraw, which is more or less every skin update. That work, resizing images, is really, really expensive. Doesn't matter generally, but if you have a low Update rate, or a lot of images it is resizing, it can have a big impact.

If you can use images in the actual size that the image files are, Rainmeter will do just a boat-load less work.

Post by **eclectic-tech** » April 2nd, 2016, 3:37 am

Thanks Jeff, I was aware of the effect re-sizing has on images.

The issue is the cropping of the image to establish bands.

There are only 2 full-screen images, and they are not being re-sized and have UpdateRate=-1, so they are never updated after loading.

However there are 40 to 120 images, cropped based on the sound level, and those are what are loading the CPU.

It has been a while since I looked into this, but I remember trying to several different methods: hide the image meters, disable audio measures, and nothing had much affect on the CPU usage... or they resulted in some undesirable effects.

I don't know if any other authors have had success in using the image crop, but I am open to any suggestions.
Thanks!

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