Which background styles allow for adaptive dialog backgrounds?

[L0bsang]

Hello @jurialmunkey,
Figured a discussion is best way to ask you a simple question about the skin.

Simply put I quite enjoy the adaptive dialog backgrounds, but noticed they do not seem to work if you set fanart as your background, or if you use fakeblur.
Does that feature only work with the realblur flixart-style backgrounds? And is there a tangible impact to the quality level of realblur you select? I have been using the lowest quality on my shield because they seem to all look the same.

[jurialmunkey]

Yeah only possible with real blur because it requires TMDbHelper to generate a blurred version of the fanart to use as the dialog background and that function is disabled in all the other background modes.

Fake blur is a trick which stretches the fanart to several 100x scale. Onscreen you only see the very edge pixels stretched out, which looks similar to blur. The rest of the image continues offscreen though, which is why it can't be used for a dialog.

Quality level of Real Blur changes the resolution of the output blurred image, which then changes the blur radius proportionally. The main advantage is less colour banding because more pixels to blur gives smoother gradients.

The size of the output image is:
Default = 480p
Medium = 720p
High = 1080p

Flixart splits the screen into four quadrants and the blur image is tiled across (with flixart overlayed in top right quadrant). So on a 1080p screen, Medium is probably actually the best since it will be closest to the quadrant size (less scaling needed). The quality only really becomes a factor on very large screens at 4k (or very up close on a smaller screen)

[L0bsang]

Yeah only possible with real blur because it requires TMDbHelper to generate a blurred version of the fanart to use as the dialog background and that function is disabled in all the other background modes.

That's what it seemed like. Thanks for the detailed answer!
I have a 50" 4K screen (and running the UI at 4K as well on a Shield) and so I think I will use default RealBlur for now since I can't notice a difference at the distance I sit and I assume it impacts performance the least.

Is there any maintenance/cleanup to be done on the generated blur images or is that done automatically now?

I feel like I remember seeing fanart images in dialog backgrounds on one of the skin versions. Was that an experiment or is still possible via a combination of settings?