I have a Bravia 5500 and 2010 series Sony Bluray player (BDP-S370). I code VBscript in my work, including some stuff that modifies XML so I was quite curious to learn more about PS3MS. So, I've read the Java primer over at Java.com and I've rolled my sleeves up and dived in...
I noticed that Windows Media Player is able to display thumbnails on the BDP-S370 for photos. PS3MS does not show thumbnails for anything on this renderer. I compared wireshark traces of this to PS3MS and I see that Windows Media offers up several sizes of image: JPEG_LRG JPEG_MED JPEG_SM JPEG_TN (example here). It advertises the resolution of each and presumably the server scales the image by reading the parameters POSTed to the URL (identical in each case). Since WMP seems to have excellent compatibility, emulating its behaviour as far as possible would seem like a good idea. I gather that some renders may choose to use the JPEG_MED or JPEG_SM images as thumbnails for instance.
I spent some time looking at the source and I discovered the hack for the condition isBravia()=true in net/pms/dnla/DNLAResource.java. I can see in the source comments that Shagrath was aiming to remove these hacks so I created a new boolean value in the renderer conf called ForceJPGThumbnails (modifying net/pms/configuration/RendererConfiguration.java and net/pms/dlna/DLNAResource.java). Setting this to true gets thumbnails to work for Web image feeds, though they don't fill the available icon size like WMP's thumbnails do.
I carried on, hoping to find some thumbnail size code. Then I discovered that in net/pms/dlna/FeedItem.java the RSS feed's own image thumbnail is used, hence there is no specified size.
Finally I noticed a comment in the code that image thumbnail support is disabled for physical photo files (not yet coded - see line 423 of net/pms/dlna/RealFile.java).
So my question is, before I potentially spend a substantial amount of time trying to implement an image scaler and learning Java (this method seems a likely fit) is there some very good reason nobody implemented this yet? By my logic image thumbnails are much more important than, say, video thumbnails. The filename of a video file is often very descriptive and the thumbnail has almost no chance of being representative, whereas for a photo it's much more useful.
