Fullscreen window vs true fullscreen - Solves slow UI
#1
So I've been pulling my hair out for months over performance on my 2010 Mac Mini. The UI was sluggish, scrolling through the list of movies with artwork was really choppy. Playing video was fine, it was just the UI. I turned on dirty regions, didn't help. A windows desktop with almost identical specs ran like butter, so I tried installing Windows 7 on the Mini and as expected performance was much better. Had a number of other issues running Windows on it though, so I went back to OSX but couldn't figure out the slow UI

Last night I played around with every possible thing I could think of. Since I had debugging on, I noticed it was running at 5.00 FPS very consistently, and found some mentions on the forum of a framerate limiter that sometimes gets turned on, but nothing specific to my issue. I changed every setting that could conceivably have an impact on the UI, and finally after turning on "Use a fullscreen window rather than true fullscreen" it solved it. Quick snappy UI now running at 60 fps.

Is this a known issue with OSX? Most of the framerate limiter discussion I saw was related to running secondary apps that futzed around with the screen and made XBMC think it wasn't running in the foreground. I'm running a very vanilla 10.6.8 Snow Leopard install, no other apps installed besides Chrome and Snatch Server for using a iDevice as a mouse (and I shut down Snatch during all my testing), so it didn't seem like that was my problem. I'd done a totally clean install, including wiping out my userdata directory, and I hadn't explicitly turned that setting off, should it be on by default on OSX? Or is there just something screwy with mine that was causing it to be necessary?
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#2
Ohh right - sounds like a bug ... will try to fix it ... but be aware - the the fullscreen window only works on osx 10.6 ... on later versions it just gives a black screen. This setting defaults to on! (using the fullscreen window instead of true fullscreen). If it was off for you - you turned it off at somepoint or something got screwed in your userdata folder.
AppleTV4/iPhone/iPod/iPad: HowTo find debug logs and everything else which the devs like so much: click here
HowTo setup NFS for Kodi: NFS (wiki)
HowTo configure avahi (zeroconf): Avahi_Zeroconf (wiki)
READ THE IOS FAQ!: iOS FAQ (wiki)
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#3
(2014-05-15, 23:21)Memphiz Wrote: Ohh right - sounds like a bug ... will try to fix it ... but be aware - the the fullscreen window only works on osx 10.6 ... on later versions it just gives a black screen. This setting defaults to on! (using the fullscreen window instead of true fullscreen). If it was off for you - you turned it off at somepoint or something got screwed in your userdata folder.

I ran into this when I installed Gotham final and was setting it up. Accidentally changed to true fullscreen. Bad mistake. Only way I could find to fix the problem was a complete clean install of xbmc and then had to reinstall all addons etc. Just out of curiosity is there an easier way to get a display back? Maybe changing a file or something?
ASUS Chromebox M004U (LibreELEC 8.2/Aeon Nox SiLVO)--->HDMI--->Onkyo TX-NR646--->HDMI--->Panasonic P65VT30
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#4
(2014-05-15, 23:21)Memphiz Wrote: Ohh right - sounds like a bug ... will try to fix it ... but be aware - the the fullscreen window only works on osx 10.6 ... on later versions it just gives a black screen. This setting defaults to on! (using the fullscreen window instead of true fullscreen). If it was off for you - you turned it off at somepoint or something got screwed in your userdata folder.

Hmm, I'm pretty sure I didn't turn it off when I did the clean install last weekend, but I could be wrong. I'll wipe XBMC completely and install from scratch this weekend and see if the setting is turned on. I have no plans on upgrading from 10.6 anytime soon (if it ain't broke...), so I'm not too worried about the black screen issue.

I'll update this thread with debug logs too

Hopefully anyone else having this problem will find this thread, I couldn't find anything related to this issue specifically when searching last night (and maybe these keywords will help: Mac Mini 10.6.8 slow UI user interface menus fullscreen window)
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#5
Well the true fullscreen mode prevents you from "cmd+tab" out to other apps - i would never recommend it ... though your issue (5fps limiter) will be fixed in one of the upcoming 13.x releases ...
AppleTV4/iPhone/iPod/iPad: HowTo find debug logs and everything else which the devs like so much: click here
HowTo setup NFS for Kodi: NFS (wiki)
HowTo configure avahi (zeroconf): Avahi_Zeroconf (wiki)
READ THE IOS FAQ!: iOS FAQ (wiki)
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Fullscreen window vs true fullscreen - Solves slow UI0