[Rrrr]

XBMC works fast in loading movies and music from a shared network resource (Synology NAS), however, opening and closing directories with pictures is terribly slow (avg picture size 2-3Mb)

If I connect XBMC to pictures on another shared network resource (Windows 7 shared files on Core i5) then I experience the same problem, be it slightly faster.

Please does anybody have a suggestion?
What causes pictures directory to load/close so terribly slow and what can be done?

PS
I have read various posts and am getting stuck in trying out all possible scenarios (using SMB sharing, UPNP sharing) and finally failing to succeed due to lack of knowhow with a premounted network sharing (http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=65788&page=3).

I also believe that SSD is not the real solution as suggested in http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...low&page=3 since in previous versions of XBMC, before Dharma, I never had this problem using the same hardware as today. It seems more a network/buffering problem for small files (?)


I am running Lucid on Asrock 330ION with Dharma beta 4.
BTW I have the same problem running W7 on Asrock 330ION with Dharma beta 4.

[Paddy69]

I have the same issue

I read that thumbs of the photos are cached after the dir is opened the first time. Will this be done recursively? is there a way to cache all photos from the top dir all the way down in the dir structure?

I also read somewhere that xbmc looks first to the exif thumbs before to look to the cache thumbs. Will cache thumbs be created when exif thumbs exists of a photo? could it be set the other way around (first look to cache then to exif) because locally stored thumbs are faster then NAS stored exif thumbs?

thnx in advance

Paddy

[Rrrr]

You are right, after opening a directory, XBMC cached all pictures inside, I can see that now. After that, opening and closing of the (cached) directories is very fast.

But not recursively as far as I can tell.
It is a bit of a pain, would be nice to have a scan into library option, like with music and video.

With you I would also like to know more about this.

[skywatcher]

Yep,i got the same problem.................very slow pic opening on new beta out there.
with old one 9.11 everthing is working just fine

[qldvoipster]

I have an Zotac Ion-ITX motherboard with dual core Intel Atom (N330) and my picture loading is also dog slow. My pictures are similar sizes (2-3MB) which is pretty standard for most digital cameras.
In a nutshell, I believe the problem is because the underpowered Intel Atom CPU is doing the hard number crunching to scale the large pixel image down to something that will fit onto a 1920x1080 HDTV. It should ideally be using the nVidia H/W acceleration to do the 2D scaling. That is why videos run so smoothly on XBMC as it uses the MPEG H/W accelleration natively and leaves the Intel Atom CPU unburdened.

I've done a contrast between my PS3 and XBMC machine on the Intel Atom and the PS3 is over 10 times quicker displaying the same image than XBMC.

Is this something that the xbmc devs are looking at?
I'm guessing Direct2D (d2d) would be the path for 2D acceleration. I recall Firefox looking into it. Might cure the painful slow scrolling of using Firefox on the same Intel Atom hardware.

I love XBMC, and the Mini-ITX Intel Atom platform is perfect for Home Theatre integration but at the moment, viewing pictures is unusable for new content while it scans the directory and generates thumbnails. It only gets marginally better when the thumbnails have been created. Typically 30seconds to display the next photo in sequence.
It's interesting that people claim it was quicker on an older version of XBMC. Can't explain that.

[athloni]

Same problem here with DLINK-NAS.
Very slow picture navigation with Dharma 10.0 Live
It worked great on my old xbox with old XBMC version and same NAS.

[athloni]

Will there be a fix in the near future?

[gpulido]

I have the same problem.
ION Atom 330. Live Dharma 10.1 installed in a USB stick.
Load pictures from the NAS is paintfull. (I have a gb network)
I also have installed XBMC as an app in my desktop PC with Ubuntu (an AMD e550 2x2,6ghz) , the same pictures, the same NAS, but it loads faster (I know that the hardware is very diferent).

Why xbmc is capable to run a 1080p of 20-32g without problems (located in the same NAS) but a photo of 2-3m is so low?

[gobba]

As they said it needs to cache the pictures. This means it has to read this 2-3mb picture and then convert it to a smaller picture and put it in the cache. So when you open a folder that isnt allready cached it needs to read through all of the pictures and convert them. This is why it is slow, lots of IO over the network and i guess cpu aswell.

I dont know how the cache structure looks like but i dont think it would be hard to make a script that makes the cache manually or use a windows program to create the cache on your own.

Find the cache folder, look how the cache files are formated and named and so on. Then use photoshop or whatever to cache them yourself with the same structure.

-gob

[splnuts]

I had the same problem when using smb. Switched to nfs and now it loads a lot faster.

[gpulido]

I'll try nfs as my nas is capable use it.

Is anything I should do in xbmc (live) to use the nfs protocol?

[gpulido]

Hello again,
I've switch between samba and nfs and all seems equal.
Loading pictures are very slow. As in my desktop installation xbmc is a bit faster it seems that is a problem of "hardware".

It is the XBMC using any kind of VDPAU optimized llibrary for the pictures?
(I don't know if that think exists). If it exists it should be using it

[Teepee]

Wondering if the caching might also explain this thread - http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?p=7...post792394 - would be really interested to know if playing music and then starting a slideshow causes the same slideshow freeze for you too. You think it's all part of the same problem? (Hope this isn't a tangent to your thread!)