Alpha channel recognition for images

[grasstust]

Blu-ray disc covers have rounded corners, that means when scanning my blu-ray DVDs it would be nice if I could define the corner areas as transparent.

Is it difficult to support alpha-channel imagefiles in DVDPedia?

[Conor]

DVDpedia handles transparent image files. How are you scanning your covers? That is an interesting idea to try to process image files to remove the background, although not an easy one.

[LifeIsBeta]

Wow, old post.

What am I doing wrong I wonder? I've saved a transparent .png file out of Photoshop, but when I drag it into DVDPedia, it adds the white background.

[Conor]

The Pedias use JPEG at the moment and that has no transparency. I was thinking like a programmer and not a user when I wrote the above post. If you add your PNG directly to the covers folder and rename it 1000.jpg DVDpedia will handle the transparency, but when dragging to DVDpedia the file is transformed from PNG to JPEG and losses the alpha channel. To summarize DVDpedia is ready to handle the alpha channel but any image it processes it does so in JPEG, this is due to the fact that we have been thinking about moving to PNG, but it has its disadvantages as well, such as bigger image sizes. If we do decide a change on image format it would be in a major upgrade.

[TylerInHiFi]

Perhaps a big change for version 5 along with some other major re-coding for boxed set support?

[marumari]

Why does the Pedia software convert the image to a different format, anyways? Seems like if it came in as PNG, it should stay as PNG. Same with JPG, GIF, or whatever.

[Conor]

JPEG is quite fast and has a small file size, which is quite attractive. Almost every source of image data comes in JPEG format already, this is the reason we initially choose this format. The images inside Cocoa are devoid of format when your handling them and hence we never did keep track of the original format the image was dragged into the program.