[innesUK]

I've had my Pi for about a week and have now got around to trying out skins.

I love the look of Aeon Nox but the Pi is very slow when using it. it takes a good 20 seconds for it to display the movies list from the home page.

is there a skin similar to Aeon Nox which is optimized for the Pi?

[joebrady]

Minimize dynamic UI content and changes

Fetching and animating dynamic content in the XBMC UI required also some CPU power. Disabling those features can also help to minimize lags or slowdowns in the XBMC UI.

Turn off RSS feeds in the Skin settings
Turn off weather information in the Skin settings
Choose a skin with as few dynamic animations as possible. The more stuff "moves" on the screen the more CPU power is required.

Confluence is nice, but I'd like to try a different skin, what are my options?
Skins that work well are Metropolis, Quartz, Quartz Reloaded, Slik. Don't even try anything like Neon, Aeon MQ, Aeon NOX, or anything just as heavy it just won't work.

http://openelec.tv/forum/124-raspberry-p...rry-pi-faq

[fma965]

I use metropolis and I love it

[guilmxm]

@innesUK

My preference goes to Quartz with no doubt, don't choose a view with fanarts behing but just thumbnails.
And as said above, some tunes are required to get the lowest CPU usage possible.

See my blog:
http://youresuchageek.blogspot.fr/2012/0...ec-on.html

Finally, i don't know if you did but you should activate some overcloking in Raspi, you'll get much better performances.
A turbo mode has been announced a few days ago, it will allow a CPU freg up to 1Ghz with above 50% performances, but you have to wait a little bit because this is not yet available in Raspbmc / OpenELEC

[caravela]

i tried them all and went back to the default Skin
On idle

Code:

Mem: 110540K used, 12480K free, 0K shrd, 8848K buff, 39464K cached
CPU: 19.3% usr  2.0% sys  0.0% nic 78.5% idle  0.0% io  0.0% irq  0.0% sirq
Load average: 0.49 0.57 0.67 1/91 2204
  PID  PPID USER     STAT   VSZ %VSZ CPU %CPU COMMAND
  915     1 root     R     285m237.6   0 15.3 /usr/lib/xbmc/xbmc.bin --standalon

Changing items on movies library

Code:

Mem: 111080K used, 11940K free, 0K shrd, 5920K buff, 42720K cached
CPU: 53.9% usr  6.6% sys  5.8% nic 32.6% idle  0.6% io  0.2% irq  0.0% sirq
Load average: 0.59 0.56 0.65 1/94 2216
  PID  PPID USER     STAT   VSZ %VSZ CPU %CPU COMMAND
  915     1 root     S     285m237.6   0 63.2 /usr/lib/xbmc/xbmc.bin --standalon
  533     2 root     SW<      0  0.0   0  1.5 [VCHIQ-0]

playback 1080p DTS

Code:

em: 110940K used, 12080K free, 0K shrd, 3628K buff, 32280K cached
CPU: 16.5% usr 14.0% sys  0.0% nic 21.6% idle 47.4% io  0.0% irq  0.2% sirq
Load average: 0.75 0.61 0.68 3/95 2211
  PID  PPID USER     STAT   VSZ %VSZ CPU %CPU COMMAND
  915     1 root     S     298m248.4   0 26.3 /usr/lib/xbmc/xbmc.bin --standalon

config

Code:

arm_freq=800
disable_overscan=1
#core_freq=333
#sdram_freq=450
hdmi_mode=32
hdmi_ignore_cec_init=1

[Symbiot]

I tried both quartz & metro based on this thread...
but both showed almost no gui... just a lot of Black... had to blindly find my way back to confluence... am I missing something?

[mayoman]

Not sure of your issue, but if you want to try alternate skins Amber is probably the best current choice for the pi.Still officially in WIP, so you will need to install the WIP repo, but general reports have been very good re its stability and performance on the pi. See here.

[Milhouse]

My personal preference is for Confluence Modified, then disable the "Busy indicator" for even better performance.

[spjonez]

reFocusBig. To use higher fidelity skins you'll need to do some tweaking- OC to 900MHz, run storage off USB, and use rbej's OpenELEC build in this forum. With those three tweaks you can use almost any skin you want.

[jayzirl]

Quartz without a doubt.

Very easy to navigate no matter who picks up the remote in our household and it is nice and light on resources.

[lysin]

Best performance skin on raspi is Amber. No other can scroll and load like Amber does (maybe except confluence). Fast, smooth and beautiful.

[Symbiot]

Not sure of your issue, but if you want to try alternate skins Amber is probably the best current choice for the pi.Still officially in WIP, so you will need to install the WIP repo, but general reports have been very good re its stability and performance on the pi. See here.

The Wip repo And.. how do I go about installing the wip repo? I am quite new to xbmc so I need some firm guidance

[sdsnyr94]

Not sure of your issue, but if you want to try alternate skins Amber is probably the best current choice for the pi.Still officially in WIP, so you will need to install the WIP repo, but general reports have been very good re its stability and performance on the pi. See here.

The Wip repo And.. how do I go about installing the wip repo? I am quite new to xbmc so I need some firm guidance

WIP = Work in Progress. The Skin Development Repo contains some of the skins that are in development so that users can install and report bugs to the developers.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=159372

The download link is toward the bottom of the first post.

[jspeer]

I also find that Bello works really pretty nice:
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Add-on:Bello

[R-max]

With the double install on a usb3 flash drive the new skin in development IMMERSIVE works pretty good on mine