alissongamer Posted June 1, 2016 Author Share Posted June 1, 2016 Note: First forgive my English, because I am Brazilian and I used google translator. I have some tips and suggestions to maintain better quality and speed in games database. First, I have collaborated a lot with ThegamesDB site, and one of the suggestions I learned from them was to convert JPEG images to PNG, as well the file maintains the quality, but is much smaller and thus scraping is much faster. Another thing, I am in favor of keeping images with the best quality possible, so I favor re-created images or who have had treatment. On the issue of re-created images, I think it is so important (with so much to maintain the originality). I even collaborate with Hyperspin creating and editing cases, and I've had many times to recreate some bad images elements. Finally I leave suggestions from some sites that can be used to take images in better quality. https://gbatemp.net/threads/cover-collections-for-emulators-with-cover-support.324714/ This site contains a large collection of covers of various systems, and mostly form recreated or edited. And for this reason it is always good to take a researched other sites about the fidelity of the cases because some of them not so faithfully recreated, but mostly are excellent and faithful. And for this reason I will indicate a few more sites that can be used to download cover art, or at least serve as a research to compare the fidelity of the site images that I quoted earlier. www.segaretro.org www.guardiana.net www.nintandbox.net www.thecoverproject.net Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted June 1, 2016 Share Posted June 1, 2016 No problem about the language differences, thank you for taking the time. For re-creations, we're not against them but we want to try and have the real thing as much as possible, but this is why we have a Recreation section for Box Art (Or we will have it if it isn't there yet). Thank you for bringing a few of these to my attention. I knew of The Cover Project, and had no clue GBATemp had a thread like that. I appreciate it. So we would love these images in our Box Art Recreated sections for everyone to use. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spektor56 Posted June 1, 2016 Share Posted June 1, 2016 Images should be in PNG format to begin with, its a lossless image format. Images should never go from jpeg to png because the file is already lossy at that point. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted June 1, 2016 Share Posted June 1, 2016 Yes, good points, but it's also worth remembering that PNG can have better compression with better quality. So if there is no real choice in the matter, converting it until a raw or a proper PNG is found may be the only choice and you can save on some HDD space. For users with bandwidth caps I can also see that being a good fit even though the conversion really only saves a small amount of data. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alissongamer Posted June 1, 2016 Author Share Posted June 1, 2016 I have a few more questions. I noticed that when the Games Database website has been created, you pulled the ThegamesDB site data, then wanted to know if the information updated there are still synchronized with the Games Database, or if the database Games Database is now independent. I ask this because I have collaborated extensively with ThegamesDB and wanted to continue, and if the two sites were synchronized I would update one. And also wanted to know if one day you intend to release the Games Database for other programs use to scrapings, such as KODI, Retropie, EmulationStation, etc ..., or if it will be unique to the LaunchBox. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted June 1, 2016 Share Posted June 1, 2016 So we pulled the data once because it was going down constantly and having issues. Since we've allowed users to start uploading their own data, we have not since gotten anymore information from them. In fact we've started pulling away even more, creating custom categories, merging and splitting systems, changing up system images and descriptions etc. One of the goals is to also allow users to upload their data to the Database from within LaunchBox as well, making the process a lot more easier than using the web portal. In terms of other media, we one day would love to include MovieDB, TVDB, AniDB, IMDB and all of those scrapers that Kodi can use so that users don't have to manually insert their data and we would make it easier to import that data as well. This is a goal that we have for the future though, we don't have immediate plans to do this unless something changes. Also, feel free to ask as many questions as you would like. We don't mind answering them at all. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted June 1, 2016 Share Posted June 1, 2016 They are separate now our DB is not affiliated with TGDB any longer and all data since the data was added to LB would be different from any changes added in TGDB as well as changes to LBGDB would not be reflected in their DB. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted June 1, 2016 Share Posted June 1, 2016 Brad I believe he was asking if Jason was going allow Kodi and those other he named access to scrape our database to get info not about adding more media types to LB but I could be mistaken that was how I read it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted June 1, 2016 Share Posted June 1, 2016 Ah I see now, sorry! Well... we have discussed internally about an API but we don't have anything to say on that subject as of yet. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted June 2, 2016 Share Posted June 2, 2016 Yes, the data for the LaunchBox Games Database will all be freely available for any application to use. In fact, anyone is able to download the entire set of data (yes, literally ALL of the data) in XML format here: http://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/Metadata.zip. This archive of data is automatically updated on a daily basis. We chose to go with a single XML format download instead of an API for performance reasons in LaunchBox. This is also much more flexible of an approach for implementing in various other applications. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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