halberstadt wrote:Just installed latest G-Force Gold (2.7.3) and cover art problem is still there. I can also confirm that rather than just being a "256 color" problem, the color in the cover art (when the problem appears) "rotates" with the colors in the G-Force display itself. That is, the distorted colors in the cover art do change continuously in sync with some of the colors in the current G-Force color scheme. As mentioned before, the problem occurs in full screen in 8 bit depth. However, if you switch to windowed mode while cover art is being displayed, the same bad effect is visible, but only until a new cover art is displayed (e.g. next tune starts).
I'm pretty new to customizing G-Force, but with all the reading and fiddling I've done in the last week, I think I can answer this question definitively.
The first thing to understand is that "windowed" mode uses the color depth setting of your OS. In my setup, I'm using Mac OS X with a color depth of millions (i.e. 32-bit). In windowed mode (in my case, inside iTunes), the cover art displays fine because G-Force is using 32-bit color depth.
In full-screen mode, G-Force uses your defined color depth setting (8, 16, or 32-bit). In 8-bit mode, only 256 colors can be displayed. This does not work well for cover art, as those types of images require at least thousands of colors to display "nicely". You can confirm this outside of G-Force by changing your OS color depth to 8-bit or 256 colors, then opening a graphic file (such as a cover art jpeg or a photo from a digital camera). The graphic will appear quite awful, as with only 256 colors it can not reproduce near the detail of color captured in the graphic file.
Since photo-type graphics display poorly in 8-bit colors, the "problem" is not with G-Force. You need to make a decision - if you want to see album cover art in fullscreen G-Force, you *must* use 16 or 32-bit mode. 8-bit mode will simply not show the cover art nicely (nor the track text). Again, this is not a limitation of G-Force, but a reality of working with only 256 colors. As I mentioned above, if your OS color depth is set to 256 colors, you will see a similar effect in *any* graphic you try to view.
The reason the cover art seems to "rotate" with the colors of the G-Force display in 8-bit mode is that as the colors presented in G-force constantly change, some colors must be "dropped" from the computer's color palette as other colors are introduced (since the palette can only hold 256 possible colors at any one time) . As the colors that are being used to display the cover art are inevitably dropped, other colors must be subsituted, which results in the rotating psychedelic effect.
When you switch to windowed mode while viewing an 8-bit cover art, the art does stay 8-bit until it fades away, the 't' key is pressed, or a new track starts (notice, however that the "rotation" effect stops). Sure, this could be considered a "glitch" or something, but it's so easily worked around, that I don't think Andy should spend any time trying to "fix" it. G-Force simply needs to refresh the display of the cover art to display it in 32 or 16-bit quality (which I guess he could easily fix if he wanted to).
As an example, I'm running iTunes on a 266 MHz G3 Macintosh. I've got fullscreen mode set to 640x480x16-bit. My cover art displays nicely, and I only get a few fps hit from using 16-bit colors. The computer is dedicated running iTunes through my home theater system, so absolutely nothing else is taking up CPU (except for VNC, and some standard system-level processes that I will start weeding out soon if possible). I'm getting generally 9 - 15 fps (and much better results with WhiteCap, FYI). No, not great, but I think it looks good enough to be pleasant. (having seen G-Force run at both 30-40 fps and sub-10 fps, there is something to be said for watching it in slow motion - give it a try sometime)
So to sum up, if you want to view cover art in fullscreen mode, you *must* choose 16 or 32-bit mode. 8-bit mode will simply not display cover art properly - not because of a problem with G-force, but because 256 colors is just not enough. Yes, you'll take a small fps hit, but that's a trade-off you must live with if you want to view cover art.
Have fun!
Marcel
