DR1000 two major problems with 2.0 firmware

[splendor]

firstly, it takes forever to finish indexing. secondly, also the unacceptable problem is that the contrast of the text is worse than before, i feel reading on an ereader makes my eyes more tired than on laptop screen now, anyone has solution? thanks

[SplogSplog]

Originally Posted by splendor

firstly, it takes forever to finish indexing. secondly, also the unacceptable problem is that the contrast of the text is worse than before, i feel reading on an ereader makes my eyes more tired than on laptop screen now, anyone has solution? thanks

Yep, those are the two problems that everybody is finding.

The slow indexing is a nuisance, since it reindexes every time you add or remove a file on the SD card. The only solution so far it to turn off thumbnail creation in the advanced settings.

The contrast one doesn't yet have a solution, other than to enlarge the text. One way to do this is to increase font size - but that seems to mess us column layout and has a few other formatting problems. The second way is to "zoom to selection" which is a bit fiddly (since you cannot be precise about how how big the letters become, you cannot un-zoom to a smaller size other than to "fit to page", and there seems to be an upper zoom limit that is too small for some text).

[myprecious]

There should be an option to completely disable indexing for those who use only folder structure.

[Matthijs]

Originally Posted by myprecious

There should be an option to completely disable indexing for those who use only folder structure.

Given the current design, that is not possible. Even the folder view works using the database, not from the folder structure itself.

We've tested and benchmarked with a lot of documents and we've not seen big performance hits for the indexing. This is likely only an issue if you have a massive collection of files and a huge folder structure.

We'd like to get all the feedback we can on the amount of files and folders from people who see serious (more than let's say 20 seconds) of delay on indexing with thumbnail generation disabled. This will allow us to reproduce the issue and possibly further improve performance.

[splendor]

Originally Posted by Matthijs

Given the current design, that is not possible. Even the folder view works using the database, not from the folder structure itself.

We've tested and benchmarked with a lot of documents and we've not seen big performance hits for the indexing. This is likely only an issue if you have a massive collection of files and a huge folder structure.

We'd like to get all the feedback we can on the amount of files and folders from people who see serious (more than let's say 20 seconds) of delay on indexing with thumbnail generation disabled. This will allow us to reproduce the issue and possibly further improve performance.

thanks for the reply. I think the contrast issue is even more urgent, its simply acceptable. I expected to have a better contrast, but it acutally turned out to be worse than before.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by splendor

thanks for the reply. I think the contrast issue is even more urgent, its simply acceptable. I expected to have a better contrast, but it acutally turned out to be worse than before.

They said in another thread that they were enhancing the anti-aliasing on the old firmware and have not added that in to the new Beta release yet, but that they are planning on it.

[pthwaite]

Once it has done the first indes on a card, any new additions etc are pretty quick, however I had around 500Mb of files (A4 and A3 pdf docs etc) as well as a few epubs and other documents and the initial index took a few hours. Though there were a couple of reboots and card check in the middle as I thought it had just given up the ghost.

[badbob001]

Originally Posted by pthwaite

Once it has done the first indes on a card, any new additions etc are pretty quick, however I had around 500Mb of files (A4 and A3 pdf docs etc) as well as a few epubs and other documents and the initial index took a few hours. Though there were a couple of reboots and card check in the middle as I thought it had just given up the ghost.

A few hours? This stuff certainly needs to happen in the background. They could put an indexing icon in the tray showing percentage done. Obviously your book view will only show what has already been indexed.

I wonder what the bottleneck is. Slow bus path between the cpu/ram/sdcard? I suppose a faster cpu and more ram doesn't hurt (one of those new 1GHz CPUs will do wonders for PDF rendering).

[myprecious]

I have approximately 2gigs of documents on my sd card (mostly pdf format) and the initial indexing took 10 to 20 minutes.

[Shaggy]

I assume the number of files is probably more relevant than the total size.

[penartur]

One of those new 1GHz CPUs will drain your battery in a hour or so.

[myprecious]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

I assume the number of files is probably more relevant than the total size.

It's about 600 documents.

[Matthijs]

When creating thumbnails and extracting metadata, the system really has to open and render each document. It cannot at present do that in the background without interfering with already open documents, but that would be a future improvement.

The indexing has two steps:
1) Find all files and folders on the card and sync that structure with global.db
2) For each newly added file, open it and get thumbnail & metadata

The first one should be pretty quick and depends only on the number of files and folders on your card. It runs each time the SD card is mounted.

The second one depends not only on number of files, but also on the complexity of your documents. You can disable (2) using the Advanced Settings. We're thinking about disabling this by default for DR1000S.

[pthwaite]

I think it would be prudent to have the thumbnail option off by default. I had around 860 files and it took couple of hours to index all that.

As an adjunct, allow the thumbnail process go ahead but to pause if a file is being opened or page turned etc and thus although it would take longer to produce, the user may not be inconvenienced as much.

[badbob001]

Originally Posted by Matthijs

2) For each newly added file, open it and get thumbnail & metadata

Just curious, but do you sort the process list by file type first? I would imagine there is a delay if the indexer has to constantly switch viewer types.