[Knight026]

I've been noticing that my CPU runs at nearly 60% just when playing music. Am I the only one with this problems? This doesn't really make sense. Playing back music with no visualizations (yes I disabled them to no avail) in the background should not take up this much CPU power.

If this does turn out to be just the way XBMC runs, then I kindly ask the XBMC developers to look into trying to fix that. One of the main concerns as an HTPC owner is the power consumption and the heat an HTPC produces. Especially to the nearly broke college student, such as myself . It would be great to listen to music with having to worry about high electric bills and it would make XBMC more environmentally friendly.

If no one else observes this, I would like some help to lower the CPU usage. Thanks!

[marv_el]

i think someone is about to fix that in general for the release after dharma. maybe someone knows more about it?

xbmc still works in "game-loop", meaning the GUI refreshes every fps, even when the screen hasn't changed.
60% are high anyway, did you enable vsync?
a good advice is to set the screensaver to "black" after few minutes idle. that's the only way to stop xbmc refreshing the screen permanently and saves a lot of cpu usage.

[Knight026]

I think I already tried that, but it still did not work. I just left the task manager running to monitor CPU usage and it was still high.