Withdrawn: No more blurry album covers!

[Tim Curtis]

The max image size is the space allocated on the screen to display the image, if you have a 2000x2000 image it’s not going to look any better than 700x700 if 700x700 is all the space there is. There may be some slight super sampling benefit from scaling down wrt smoothness but I think sharpness is the desire here.

The limitations in moOde 6.7x doesn't mean that 7.x and/or later can't be enhanced to take advantage of 8K or larger monitors using a larger size (the largest of which I suggested was 1000x1000).

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There will always be some degree of scaling because the image won’t ever be exactly the size of the space allocated for it, downscaling is obviously better than upscaling.

That's why it would be better to downscale it from an 800x800 thumbnail than to upscale it from a 400x400 thumbnail.

We don’t want people thinking they want maximum quality and choose the highest possible settings and end up with a slower system than if we’d just used the orginal cover art. 

All you have to worry about as a developer is choosing reasonable defaults that will work well for most users with typical setups and personal priorities.  Users of video games adjust anisotropic filtering, full screen anti-aliasing, texture resolutions, motion blur, view distance, fog quality, ambient occlusions, and shader quality, all while balancing off performance vs. display quality. So I think that moOde users can be trusted to adjust album art thumbnail size and quality, especially since it's only those users who are dissatisfied with the default settings.

A png thumb would be > 1MB for 800x800 and again wouldn’t offer any benefit over the original cover art.

I'll give you a perfect example of where an 800x800 PNG has an advantage.  Here's a 3.2MB, 1500x1500 JPEG of the album art for the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Resized to an 800x800 PNG, it clocks in at under 1.5MB.

PNGs offer advantages over of JPEG, especially in images that include text, like most album covers.  

JPEG, unlike JPEG XS. is not designed for high multi-generation robustness.  It's DCT data compression algorithm is optimized for a single generation encoding from a lossless image source, much as MP3's data compression is optimized for a single generation encoding from a lossless audio source.  As you make JPEGs of JPEGs, you increase the artifacting in ways that become more visually apparent.

Note:  I understand that PNG is off the table for reasons of code complexity.  Nothing in this message should be interpreted as my suggesting that is the wrong choice.  It's just a technical discussion.
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The gamer space is not really a good comparison to the moOde space since gamers are heavily $$$ invested into the highest levels of tech and are really into and benefit from all the options and tweaks.

The moOde space is one where we have to make tradeoffs in some of the features we offer so they work well on a variety of tech and don't create support nightmares.

The image you provided is super nice so let's see what happens at various resampling resolutions and qual levels.