Neon skin is too slow
#1
I am using X4 635 with 785 GMT gigabyte mobo & 4 GB Ram. But after the installation of Neon skin, my XBMC become tooooo slow and ultimately I had to delete it.

Pls tell is this a very heavy skin or how to solve this problem. Secondly, pls tell how to change background pictures & how to manually put the movie details in XBMC?
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#2
rohitshakti Wrote:I am using X4 635 with 785 GMT gigabyte mobo & 4 GB Ram. But after the installation of Neon skin, my XBMC become tooooo slow and ultimately I had to delete it.

Pls tell is this a very heavy skin or how to solve this problem. Secondly, pls tell how to change background pictures & how to manually put the movie details in XBMC?

Shouldn't be slow at all... Care to elaborate on what sees slow?

Change backgrounds in skin settings and it sounds like you could use help found here: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=XBM...he_Library
-stoli-
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#3
Funny thing is we had a poster here a few weeks back that complained it was too fast.

I actually REALLY like this skin because it's so customizable to give me everything I want and I think it's actually faster than the stock Confluence.
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#4
I'm running it on an X2 with 3GB of memory and its not slow at all....very fast and fluid even pulling thumbnails and content over WIFI from my server.

Thanks for all your hard work stoli!
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#5
mbbransc Wrote:Funny thing is we had a poster here a few weeks back that complained it was too fast.

I actually REALLY like this skin because it's so customizable to give me everything I want and I think it's actually faster than the stock Confluence.
Hi All
I've started from Night then Aeon, Transparency and then i met this lovely skin and certainly his Skiner/Developer (Stoli) who answers in any question.
Finally i stopped here because finally it is light and fast (responses in your orders at once) and presents a lot of options
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#6
@rohitshakti:

Your motherboard comes with an integrated Radeon 4200 card. If that's your primary display adapter (you haven't added a dedicated video card), you may have some trouble with large images (fanart primarily) in the library. It's not a bad card by any means and should suffice for 720 playback. If you're running 1920x1080 on that card, while it is capable of doing it, you're pushing the limits of the hardware, so the occasional hiccup in speed when flipping through the menus could be expected. The easiest fix is to get a bigger badder card, assuming you haven't already. If a new card is beyond your budget or you're waiting to do a full system upgrade, there are a lot of tricks you can use to get a little more speed out of XBMC. Read on.

@anyone interested:

I had some speed issues in certain views. Changing AdvancedSetting.xml to use .dds files for fanart, and then batch converting them to .dds fixed the issue 100% for me. It's now lightning fast.

One other minor slowdown I've encountered is if you use a podcast rss on the custom home-screen menu, you get a bit of lag when hovering over it (before clicking to enter it). It's noticeable, but not too inconvenient so I haven't looked too far into it. Could be something to do with the online source or the image I'm using for the menu item. At this point, I'm assuming it's something I've done on my end slowing it down. Taking that item out of the custom home screen menu immediately resolves the issue.

Other than that, in new builds I've had trouble with iphone and android remotes lagging. If he was experiencing that, it would be the same under every skin.

None of these have anything to do with Neon, but if you have speed problems, here's the checklist of things to look at:

• Check that the System is up to spec.
Windows
Live
Linux
Mac

• No scheduled tasks running in background. Some of the later uTorrent and firefox builds compete for memory with a lot of downloads going simultaneously, even taxes my system with 8GB RAM. Close out of anything unnecessary. Anti virus shouldn't be scanning. There are a number of scripts and programs in Windows you can run that will auto-kill unneeded processes before launching a program like XBMC. I know similar scripts can be found for Linux users, and I assume Mac users would also have something comparable.

• Depending on what version of windows you use (assuming you're running Windows), don't Alt-Tab out of XBMC and then Alt-Tab back into it. The thread priority sometimes (but not always) drops to low and everything slows. Either change priority in Task Manager before re-entering XBMC or close it completely. You can create a custom shortcut that executes XBMC using the "start" command, with the high priority switch for a little extra boost of speed. To do that create a Batch file with the following:
Quote:Start "XBMC" /high "C:\{your install path}\XBMC.exe"


• Use an SSD. You can get an SATA 32GB SSD for around $60 now, and it's not much more for a 128GB model. No modern PC should be without one. Installing XBMC on an SSD virtually eliminates all lag in the menus.

• Too poor (or cheap) for an SSD? I feel your pain. Create a RAM Disk on boot up and mirror your entire XBMC install to that. It takes an extra minute or so to boot up the system, but it's even faster than an SSD. Just remember to copy the updated files back to the HDD before shutdown (I recommend a script), otherwise you'll be doing the same library updates every time you add something. It's a pain in the ass, but works really well if speed is your primary concern.

• Convert Fanart and thumbs to .dds. This is the most profound speed increase you can get, I can't understand why it isn't the default functionality yet. If you have a large library to convert you may have to spend 4-5 hours doing it (it's an automated process you can have running while you sleep). But it's time well spent, definitely worth doing. There are several ways to do this, rather than go into them all, here's a quick tutorial I found: How to increase the speed of XBMC. Remember to use the 32bit version of the nVidia toolkit, even if you have a 64bit PC and OS, only the x86 version works. I believe this will still work with ATI cards, but don't quote me on that as I don't have anything ATI to test it myself.

• Clean your Library. Tutorial for newbies:Clean Video Library

• Try not to store media on external drives if you can avoid it. Networks should be hard-wired (not wifi), and use modern routers and switches. Nothing is worse than seeing "Buffering -1%" flash across the screen or dropping a network source because the microwave in the other room is screwing with your wireless signal.

Being multi-platform means XBMC will never be 100% optimized for your system. Windows, Mac, Linux, Live, AppleTV, IOS and xbox users will always have different needs. The guy with a dedicated HTPC and the college kid who jumps between XBMC and general computing will have different needs. Then each of those groups has thousands of possible hardware combinations to be considered. The Devs have done an amazing job with getting XBMC to run smoothly on a default install, but there's always room for you to improve upon the default settings. There's a lot that can be done on the user end to remedy any speed issues and tweak the program to your specific hardware and OS.

I know all this info is scattered around the forums and wiki already, but I'll dump it here anyway in case anyone erroneously thinks the cause of the slowdown is this skin. If you've done all (or even just some) of these steps and still have a problem, post details.
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