[gizmotoy]

Hello,

I recently installed the latest wide release of Eden (i.e. from website, not a nightly build) under Windows 7 on the latest Mac Mini hardware (2GHz i7 Quad, Intel HD3000 Graphics, 10GB RAM).

Essentially, any UI navigation animation that requires loading up a large image is choppy. In the Aeon Nox skin this includes switching between the main sections on the home screen, or within poster walls if I enable Fanart. The same poster wall with Fanart disabled navigates smoothly. Interestingly, if I cycle between a small subset of the main menu items, it's also perfectly smooth. It's almost as if it can cache 2-3 of these and load them immediately. If I scroll through the menu continually in one direction, though, I get the choppy behavior.

I know the video card isn't the greatest, but it's handling full-bitrate Blu-Ray rips just fine. It's just the UI that seems choppy. I wouldn't have thought a static image would trip it up, especially with so much RAM available (only about 2GB used out of 10GB).

Is there anything I can look at to try to figure out what's going on or squeeze out some extra performance? I disabled the Fullscreen in a Window option since I read that can cause problems, but had no luck. I also tried Dirty Regions and disabling all add-ons (which weren't many since it was a fresh install) and extra features. The graphics hardware drivers are set to performance. I can't figure out why it's not cooperating.

I started over in the Aeon Nox forum, but it sounds like it might be OS/Device specific since it appears to work just fine on lesser hardware and I was hoping someone here might have some insight. A link to the original thread is below.

Thanks!

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=139007

Added videos of the problem here:
Windows with choppy UI: http://youtu.be/PK2iFdsQuwY
Windows with choppy UI (background effect off): http://youtu.be/VloNSw4yKe8
OS X with smooth UI: http://youtu.be/FVs62P9xyD8

[thrak76]

Reading over the posts already on this topic, might you try and host all the images on the local machine and see if that helps? You didn't mention whether you had tried that yet or not.

I can be crushing my CPU (98-99% usage) with an encode, and still be able to run Nox smoothly, but everything is kept locally.

[Ned Scott]

debug log (wiki) needed.

[gizmotoy]

I would have tried local storage for art already except for the fact that the main menu has the exact same behavior and those images are obviously stored locally. It seems like they're two symptoms of the same issue, but I can't figure out what that may be.

I can be crushing my CPU (98-99% usage) with an encode, and still be able to run Nox smoothly, but everything is kept locally.

This is what makes me think something is seriously wrong since you're not the first one who has said that. The images for the skin's main menu are definitively local, and yet I still have trouble.

Debug logs attached:
http://xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=7222
http://xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=7223

I've looked around, and can't seem to figure out how to make the art (posters, fanart, etc) get pulled from the local machine. Is there a setting somewhere? I could copy it all over, but I'm not sure how XBMC would know to use the local versions. I have a couple Boxee Boxes that use this info as well, so I can't just move it to the local drive permanently and have the .nfo point there.

[Ned Scott]

I don't see anything obviously wrong in the logs. So it's just in Nox that you have this issue?

[gizmotoy]

Confluence for the most part is ok. Navigating the similar main menu is smooth 99% of the time, only very occasionally exhibiting a similar jerky transition. So it seems like Nox seems to be triggering this weird behavior more often than the other skins.

All skins choke on my fanart, which at this point I guess we can blame on them being on the network, though my userdata folder seems to be full of all of my posters and fanart locally in .tbn format. That's something I'll have to figure out how to resolve.

Interesting wrinkle: This all works perfectly under the OS X port. The menus are 10x snappier, and there's no animation choppiness, not even when accessing my fanart. In addition, it's like this with all widgets enabled (I had everything disabled under Windows). So it's definitely specific to Windows for some reason. I don't know if that helps figure out what the problem might be or not.

[gizmotoy]

I uninstalled all hardware-related drivers and reinstalled them. No luck. Then I tried the latest nightly (8/25), and that didn't help either.

This is frustrating

[gizmotoy]

I decided to go all out and just wipe out Windows and start over. I reinstalled fresh, installed only the necessary drivers for my hardware (including the latest graphics drivers), and XBMC. Menu navigation is still choppy, and may subjectively be worse than before I reinstalled.

The menu animation looks an awful lot like two distinct frames. As in it gets a frame in halfway between the menus, and then again once it arrives at the menu you've selected. Ugh. Changing my display resolution to 720p from 1080p didn't have any effect either. I have to go all the way down to 512x384 to get decent performance out of the menus, and even then it still glitches occasionally.

There has to be something I'm missing if it works fine on OS X and is choppy in Windows.

Any other ideas? I'm willing to try just about anything at this point.

[gizmotoy]

Last night I tried using my actual HDTV instead of a spare 1080p monitor. I tried all of the different refresh rates it supports hoping one of them would make some kind of difference, but unfortunately it did not. I also tried running XBMC as an administrator and in the various compatibility modes. I tinkered with a number of dirty regions and nofliptimeout settings with the behavior being identical through all of them.

I also tried a number of different skins in the default repo. Any skin that changes a large percentage of the screen at once has this hiccup, including the Confluence default. I had thought previously that it was OK, but I was wrong. It doesn't glitch as badly, but it's still there. Maybe because the fade between full-screen images is shorter? Not sure.

I wanted to take some high-quality HD videos for you guys so you can see what I'm talking about. You can see in the Windows version my framerate drops into the high 40s when I navigate the menus, whereas in the OS X version it's solid at 60fps. The Windows version is using my CPUs at an average of 4-5%, whereas on OS X they're all at 0% (on-screen debug shows them individually on OS X instead of the average). I notice that OS X uses OpenGL and Windows DirectX and thought that could be the solution, but it appears OpenGL is unsupported on Windows.

Windows with choppy UI: http://youtu.be/PK2iFdsQuwY
OS X with smooth UI: http://youtu.be/FVs62P9xyD8


I have tried literally everything I can think of. Could this be a bug? Any XBMC developers lurking here?

[thrak76]

Turn off "background effect" in skin--> general?

[gizmotoy]

Yes, I had background effect turned off in the Windows example. It actually works perfectly well either way on OS X, so at least on that OS there appears to be plenty of headroom.

[thrak76]

Actually, in your video it's turned on.

[gizmotoy]

Actually, in your video it's turned on.

So it is. I'll go back and take another video. It'll take about an hour to upload. If you can take my word for it until then, on Windows, Background/Effect On/Off has no effect on the behavior. It's the same either way. I've tried probably every possible combination of settings at this point, and must have just left that one on by accident.

[gizmotoy]

Updated video here: http://youtu.be/VloNSw4yKe8

[gizmotoy]

It sounds like there are no further ideas for what could be wrong, so I submitted a bug report.

For reference, here is the link:
http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/13292