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+----- Thread: [MOD] Xbox friendly version of MediaStream v1.00 (/showthread.php?tid=42419)
- JustMeD - 2009-02-15
Numus this sounds more like a fanart issue since when using non library your content plays better. Try decreasing the size of your downloaded fanart stored on your xbox to something like 896px wide to see if that makes a difference.
D
- 2-7offsuit - 2009-02-17
paul Wrote:Yes you can reduce the the dimensions of the .pngs but remember xbox will in most cases then have to upscale them thus using more memory. you only have to try rocky5's liter .xpr
it's about 5mb i think and it looks bloody awfull and memory was only improved by about 1mb in most cases. as i stated before i spent a lot of time trying to come up with way's to save memory with this skin and in the end i just went for a balance of memory / quality and there the ones your using, but by all means don't take my word for it have a go you may improve it for your uses. skunkmonkee even suggested that if any .png's were removed Ie not used any more then go through the .xmls and remove any mention of it in there?
This should save it some memory but i never got round to that one? let me know what results you get as i am curios to know if it can be improved.
I played around with this quite a bit this weekend. The first thing I found was that your .pngs could be optimized quite a bit by just running them through something like pnggauntlet. It doesn't degrade the image quality and it helps, but it doesn't make a huge difference. Also a couple of them were corrupt, so maybe it was an issue XPR Express unzipping them incorrectly. Had you optimized them before?
The other thing I looked at was reducing the colors to 256 instead of millions. This can result in a significant difference in the memory it takes to keep it open. My problem however, was that after making the modifications to your .pngs, XPR Express would fail upon rezipping it. Is this something that you've looked into before?
- paul - 2009-02-18
Yes i could have reduced the dimensions further and yes i could have dropped the bit depth further but this would have resulted in poor on screen graphics and so i decided to go for a balance of quality and performance and over 90% of feedback i have received say it had improved there xbox's performance and also as it runs absolutely fine on my xbox's i decided to leave them as they are.
With regards to re packing the textures with xpr express i have never known it to fail to work like you describe you could try using XBMCTex.exe this you place in the same folder as your png textures and click on it the only problem with it is it locks the .xpr but it does work very well and is a lot quicker than xprexpress.
- 2-7offsuit - 2009-02-18
Using PNG Gauntlet won't actually reduce the dimensions or the bit depth. It just creates a smaller size png.
I know you said it works for you, but since it doesn't work for me (and some other people) I'd really like to get it optimized as much as possible. Would it be possible for you to upload your pngs before they've been added to the xpr? Did you make any other modifications? ie, to the XMLs?
Also, both XBMCTex and XPR Express fail with the same "runtime error code: r6025" It's not every time though. Only when certain files have been modified. I'm hoping I can just get around that with new pngs. Otherwise, I'm totally lost there.
- paul - 2009-02-18
For your information i have spent the last few hours trying your sugestions and i was sceptical
to say the least, but i ran all .pngs through png gauntlet and on the face of it i does compress them down well but when you recompress them into the .xpr it seems to make them bigger and thus has no effect on the xbox's memory.
If you want to try it your self this is what i do...
1. download mediastream from svn
2. copy all lite textures into the main media folder
3 reduce all textures by 50% of there dimensions and save to 24bit unless they have transparency in which case use the default 32bit otherwise it will look garbled.
4. remove preview views these do save some memory
5. repack them using your prefered program ie xprexpress or XBMCTex
and i got exactley the same results as i did with my other releases ie 33mb free ram(on my test xbox's One is a version 1.2 one is a version 1.4 one is hard modded one is soft modded) same results on each both play all media from either the local hard drive or over my home network via smb sharing.
My version of xbmc on xbox is dated 25 jan 2009(latest)
The only other thing i can think of to reduce memory further would be to attack the .xl files and remove all mention of any textures removed from the xpr but this falls out side of my field of expertise, so if you can improve on it let me know so others can benefit from the improvements.
- 2-7offsuit - 2009-02-18
Perfect, that's what I was looking for. I wanted to be able to start from what you had already accomplished, because we already know that works. It sounds like you've probably reduced the textures as much as possible. Although I'm still curious if the backgrounds could be merged into one image instead of three. From what I can tell, they're only cut up into three incase the blade is set to the middle. If not, maybe I can at least disable the left image on the home screen since you can barely see them through the blade.
I've been looking through the XMLs, it's beyond my expertise as well, but I figure this is a good time to learn.
My last question is what image editor you use? IrfanView seems to have trouble with it's batch processing.
- paul - 2009-02-18
To be honest i use Paint.NET V3.36 it's pretty basic but it does what i need. the problem is i had to resize each texture one at a time and it took me bloody ages but time well spent.
I'm not sure joining the home backgrounds together will be quite so easy as it's not a simple task by any means. but don't let me put you off trying.
- skunkm0nkee - 2009-02-19
Background images are split for a few reasons, two of which are pretty important - one of them is the layering for hiding the sub-menus and the other is that (for some reason) it was quicker and smoother for XBMC (on the xbox primarily) to load the 3 images seperately than it was for it to load one big one.
BTW, reducing the file size on a PNG without affecting the dimensions of the image itself will not really affect the size of the XPR or memory usage at all. As I've said in a few threads and posts, the textures get placed in the XPR in a bitmap style which means that the things which most affect the memory usage are width and height of the image, not the file size.
- paul - 2009-02-19
I assumed that was the case regarding file size, thanks for the tips its most helpful
- 2-7offsuit - 2009-02-19
skunkm0nkee, thanks for the info. It was easy enough to remove the left images from the home screen. (I must have messed up the transparency of the blade, because I couldn't see the submenus.) It's not really a viable solution though. It leaves the black strip after the blade disappears. I'll leave those alone now.
I'm glad you cleared up the issue on PNG size too. That makes more sense now. I'll look around for some more information on how the XPRs are created.
I did make one significant (to me) discovery last night though. Simply changing the font to AltDefault frees up another ~1.5mb of memory. For some reason the default fonts are huge files. After striping out the font XML and resizing some of the images my self, I was able to get between 33-34mb free. I'm kind of shooting for the 35mb mark to make it as reliable as PM3 HD on the Xbox.
- paul - 2009-02-20
Question is can you now play your videos ok with 33mb of ram free as i found over 33 is enough to play all media succesfully, an interesting point about the fonts i will mess around with the fonts see if i can improve on 33 - 34 mb
- jmadonald - 2009-02-20
thanks!! the lite version of minimalko's mod has played all video files. thanks to all for your hard work. can't wait for the new skins.
- paul - 2009-02-20
am pleased it works for you
- 2-7offsuit - 2009-02-20
paul Wrote:Question is can you now play your videos ok with 33mb of ram free as i found over 33 is enough to play all media succesfully, an interesting point about the fonts i will mess around with the fonts see if i can improve on 33 - 34 mb
33mb is enough to play videos, but low enough to creep back down after one. That's why I was kind of setting my goal at 35.
- paul - 2009-02-21
that's not really the skin at fault it's xbmc at fault i tend to find with 33mb free i can watch around 6-7 40 min tv episodes before i have to restart xbmc to clear the memory.
B.T.W I now get 36mb free ram after playing around with the fonts i would never have considered the font' to be an issue so thanks for that feedback i will get round to updateing
my moded versions asap