[smorges]

Hi,

I just upgraded to 2.01 from a release that was nearly a year old.

The upgrade went fine and I put in all the settings back in but im now finding that hdd spindown doesn’t work like it used to.

I use xmbc every single day for streaming avi files from my PC hdd and ive got an 80gb hdd in my xbox that’s very loud and ive always had hdd spindown setup and it would turn off the hdd after a user determined time and then my xbox would be whisper quiet and I could pause the streaming video with the xbox hdd still being off. It was great.

After upgrading I find that you cant tell it after how many seconds to turn the hdd off just how long a video file has to be for the hdd to switch off and when I pause a video (which inevitably happens quite often) there is a pause and the hdd switches itself back on! Then doesn’t always turn back off when unpaused.

Is there any way to stop this as it’s really annoying?

I love xbmc 2.0, but the spindown is a major factor for me. If there is no way to stop it I might just have to go back to an earlier version.

[kraqh3d]

when you hit pause, xbmc needs to fetch the icons from the disc. they are not kept in memory due to memory constraints.

[ultrabrutal]

I find this very annoying too, that it needs to turn on the harddrive to fetch an icon so small it shouldn't matter. There are pleanty of memory available when viewing videos even with a large cache.
Can you explain why this is really needed to keep out of memory and possibly make it a setting for all those using hd spin down?
Thanks

[Cimlite]

I was also just wondering about this, did the memory usage really go up that much since those older versions where XBMC did not have this behavior?

If it absolutely is required to not keep those icons in memory, then I'd like to make a suggestion. Why not add support to store them on a USB thumb drive instead? Sort of like Windows Vista ReadyBoost. Best of both worlds.

It's the one thing that annoys me about XBMC at the moment. Otherwise it's so close to perfection.

[SleepyP]

I can appreciate the sentiment, but your suggestion is a bit silly. Support for USB devices in XBMC is very unfinished at this point in time: READ-ONLY access for devices under 4 GB in size. ReadyBoost is retarded BTW...

[[email protected]]

it would only need to be read only, since your only reading your icons/skin off the drive

[smorges]

So is there no way to implement this? Surely it makes sense to make room in the memory for surely small sized icons to save the hdd having to turn on every time you paused a stream?

Please please please, find some ways of putting this back into a future release as I really like the changes to 2.0 and it would be a shame to have to go back to an earlier version.

[spiff]

do you really think there's special code just for that icon?

no there isnt. and no it won't be added. imo we should rip out the hdd spindown stuff completely

[SleepyP]

it raises an interesting problem: how do you put the stuff onto the USB disk, and how do you make sure you put all the neccessary stuff onto it? not saying its impossible, just trying to think-out the implementation. On the face of it it sounds like way too much work for the devs given the already sketchy nature of the USB drive support.
I would think there's gotta be some better way to do this purely in software. Would it be possible to make a "lite" skin which is sufficiently small that it can be cached entirely into RAM? If you had the skin in RAM and turned off the thumbnail caching, then you'd still have thumbnail icons without touching the harddisk once they are cached. Of course, they'd display really freaking slow because they'd have to be re-cached into RAM from wherever like whenever you are browsing. Turning the thumbs off completely and using a small skin would be the fastest/easiest way to get it done.

[elupus]

nobody feels like maintaining it it's to easy to break with a very minor change. to much work for too little gain.

[[email protected]]

i agree that its not the best idea, but it could be possilbe to use a usb skin, that means that hdd spin down wouldnt need to be on as the usb doesnt 'spin' thus make noise. to be honest i dnt hear my xbox and i dnt have a special hdd or fan, my sky box(sat) makes more noise.

[BigSurf]

do you really think there's special code just for that icon?

no there isnt. and no it won't be added. imo we should rip out the hdd spindown stuff completely

PLSE! Don't remove the HDD spindown option. I can live (allthough very annoying) with the spinup on pause, but cannot live with the spindown option being removed.

Note: it is possible to replace the existing 3.5" harddrive with a 2.5" notebook hdd, you won't hear that one.. Maybe i'll do that in the future when bigger 2.5" disks become available.

[SleepyP]

what harddisk do you use that is "so annoyingly loud" I need to know so I can avoid buying one in the future I use a 500GB Maxtor and it's way quieter than my fan

[ultrabrutal]

I use a 400 gb Hitachi with some accustic changes done to it. Even then it's loud! I love the spin down feature and would hate to have it removed!
I exchanged my fan to a 14 db low noise fan which I cannot hear. Only thing I hear now is my harddrive.

devs: I understand that the gui functions are the same, but that does not mean that you cannot extend the system and tag some resources so they are left in memory and freed manually when exiting video playback. These few resources needed during playback from video cannot take such amounts of memory that video playback is impossible. Keeping them in memory, will make XBMC more responsive as reading it from harddrive takes time. especially then the drive is powered off and needs to be powered on again.

The worst part of the power on problem is that some drives are very slow (and extra loud) to power up (7200 rpms?). The stock drive is much faster and alittle less loud than the 7200 when powering on, sadly it's not really possible to buy large 5400 rpm drives anymore. I guess a notebook harddrive could be a better option, but they are much more expensive and not so big.

2 cents spent

[SleepyP]

hehe put your Xbox inside a box of some sort