[drewski322]

First off, I'm new so sorry if these questions are basic...

I just bought a Raspberry Pi running OpenElec 3.2.4 and XMBC 12.2. I bought it primarily to stream live sports and shows and movies using the addons like icefilms and sprotsdevil.

My issue is how long it takes to get a show started. It can take up to ten minutes to start a stream of a show that starts instantly running XMBC on an old Macbook. Once it gets started it runs pretty smoothly tho.

I've tried with both wifi and ethernet connection.

I may be picky here, but are there any ways I can improve the performance? Get the shows or live streams starting a little faster? Maybe improve the performance moving through the menus? Would updating the software help? Anyway to do that with a mac and without using an SD card reader?

Sorry to be such a beginner, but any help would be really appreciated, thanks.

[popcornmix]

You won't get support for piracy add-ons here.
OpenELEC 3.2.4 is no longer support - update to latest (4.0.7).
Is it a 256M Pi?

[drewski322]

Sorry about the add-on thing, I'm not looking for specific support for them just really for a speed-up of anything that is streamed.

It's a 512M Pi and I just did update it successfully to 4.07 with really no change. Once it gets connected to a stream, it runs fine, very smoothly on HD with no buffering issues, but it takes several minutes to get started no matter what the stream.

Any other suggestions?

[popcornmix]

You should try overclock.
Ethernet is likely to be faster than wifi.
Post a debug enabled log file and there may be some clues there.

[drewski322]

I'm currently using an ethernet connection (although I've timed similar tasks with wired and wireless with very little difference).

I'll do a debug-enabled log file and post it but I don't know how. Can you walk me through that?

Does overclocking make a big difference with streaming? I'm willing to give it a try.

[drewski322]

OK, well now i REALLY need some help...

I tried to do a modest overclocking but i must have f'd something up while editing the config file because I essentially bricked my brand new device. I went to reboot it and it just shutdown and now won't restart when i plug it back in.

I only have one computer at home (a mac) and no SD card reader. Is there anyway I can get everything back up and working with an SD card reader?

[drewski322]

Ok, I actually used my phone as an SD card reader and fixed the problem, I had put core_freq as 3000, not 300...

Anyways, I'm back up and running, overclocked to an arm frequency of 800 and core of 300, still pretty slow tho, any other suggestions or tweaks? Or is this just the standard for Rpi? Like literally over 5 minutes of "working" to start playing a show

[Dalton63841]

My pi is stable with these settings:

gpu_mem_512=256
arm_freq=1050
core_freq=500
sdram_freq=600
over_voltage=8
hvs_priority=0x32ff
force_turbo=1

It is quite snappy. Certainly not "5 minutes of working".

[drewski322]

Do you use a heat sink with those settings?

[Dalton63841]

Do you use a heat sink with those settings?

I did put heatsinks on mine since it is in a tight case. Just a cheap set like these work fine.

[ActionA]

I've never seen a heatsink necessary. Don't waste your money.

[da-anda]

OpenElec4 should already be faster than v3, but the CPU of the PI is limited. Not knowing what mentioned addons do in the background, whatever it is, I suppose it's just to heavy for the PIs CPU. How do other addons behave, like YouTube when you stream stuff? If your issue is only related to those mentioned addons, all you can do is overclock and ask the addon authors to improve their addons and make them more efficient.

[DBMandrake]

My pi is stable with these settings:

gpu_mem_512=256
arm_freq=1050
core_freq=500
sdram_freq=600
over_voltage=8
hvs_priority=0x32ff
force_turbo=1

It is quite snappy. Certainly not "5 minutes of working".

Setting gpu memory unnecessarily high won't improve performance, in fact it may make it worse because you've reduced the available arm memory by 128MB - memory that can help the OS to run more smoothly, especially if you're running extra background services or using a larger than normal cache size.

Unless you're trying to play HD content with dvdplayer (instead of omxplayer) or increasing fan art resolution above the defaults 128MB of gpu memory is fine, (I've never needed to increase it) if you do need more a small increase of 16 or 32MB is probably plenty rather than doubling it. Any allocated but unused gpu memory just goes to waste.

You can monitor gpu memory usage under different conditions with bcmstat.

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Sorry about the add-on thing, I'm not looking for specific support for them just really for a speed-up of anything that is streamed.

It's a 512M Pi and I just did update it successfully to 4.07 with really no change. Once it gets connected to a stream, it runs fine, very smoothly on HD with no buffering issues, but it takes several minutes to get started no matter what the stream.

Any other suggestions?

Do you mean it sits on the file list for several minutes after selecting an item, or that the playback screen comes up and it sits buffering for several minutes before it starts playing ? If the latter what happens if you press play to force playback to commence while it still says buffering ? You could try setting readbufferfactor to 4 and see if that helps.

I certainly don't experience this degree of delay with any of the addons I use. I typically see 5-10 seconds at most, dependent on the speed of the server.