[johngalt007]

I recently installed dharma live version, but I can't stand the abysmally slow browsing of pictures. This was the problem with previous version of xbmc live as well.

I am accessing the pics via a SMB share on Windows 7 and my picture folders contain jpg and raw files. My jpg files are between 3-5 MB, while the raw ones are 13-16 MB.

Why should browsing the folders and pictures take this long when another windows machine can access the same share on the same network much faster (almost instantaneously)?

What can I do to have acceptable browsing speed? I even ran tversity on my windows machine with transcoding always enabled for my picture folder and tried accessing it using upnp, but even that does not work!!

[guwu]

I'm in the same boat as johngalt007. Pictures is a no go with my current XBMC install (Dharma Beta2 Live). Access is via SMB network share. Scanning folders with images in it is incredibly slow an nearly useless. Any idea of how to speed things up a bit?

[RockDawg]

RAW is dog slow (I assume because of the large file size), but why view RAW files on XBMC anyway? In my experience, XBMC doesn't see/read any of the post processing done by any of the major RAW converters so you're viewing an unprocessed image.

JPG, on the other hand, works fine for me. What I do is convert all my RAW files to JPG with a max resolution of 1920 on the long side and save them to a second folder which I use as the source for viewing my photos on XBMC. Works well and my pictures look a lot better than if I viewed the RAW files.

[johngalt007]

Rockdawg, since XBMC does not show raw files, their presence in the same folder and their size should be a non-issue.

Anyways, even the folders containing only jpg images of less than 3 MB show up slow to the point of being unusable.

Anyone had any luck with transcoding provided by tversity? I have set 1024 as the max vertical resolution for pics in tversity, but it does not seem to work!

[tslayer]

XBMC is probably generating the thumbnails for everything. Check log while the slowness is happening.

[johngalt007]

There seems to be nothing in the log that suggests anything odd of this sort. see log here:

http://pastebin.com/embed_js.php?i=RDHjBrwg

XBMC is probably generating the thumbnails for everything. Check log while the slowness is happening.

[RockDawg]

Rockdawg, since XBMC does not show raw files, their presence in the same folder and their size should be a non-issue.

Anyways, even the folders containing only jpg images of less than 3 MB show up slow to the point of being unusable.

Anyone had any luck with transcoding provided by tversity? I have set 1024 as the max vertical resolution for pics in tversity, but it does not seem to work!

I haven't tried in over a year, but I could have sworn that XBMC used to show RAW files. In fact if I remember correctly, it used to show the actual RAW file and not the JPG within it. Maybe I'm misremembering or something's changed. I'll try when I get home tonight.

I understand your problems with the JPG's. I said I have no problem with mine to demonstrate that it doesn't seem to be a global issue with XBMC. Mine are stored on a network accessed via SMB also. They're not lightning fast, but I'd geuss it takes ~1 second for XBMC to switch photos while navigating.

Hope you get it sorted out!

[RockDawg]

EDIT: Never mind. Brain fart!

[johngalt007]

It may have something to do with the resolution of pictures. If the resolution is low, the pics may get loaded fast. While, my pictures are 3-5 MB, and XBMC does not seem to scale well with those.

Even navigating to the picture folders is too slow.

I understand your problems with the JPG's. I said I have no problem with mine to demonstrate that it doesn't seem to be a global issue with XBMC. Mine are stored on a network accessed via SMB also. They're not lightning fast, but I'd geuss it takes ~1 second for XBMC to switch photos while navigating.

Hope you get it sorted out!

[johngalt007]

since I am beginning to get disappointed with no solutions proposed to this problem, let me look for another way to solve this problem:

Is there a software that runs in the background (as a service or server) that would automatically reduce resolution of the pictures stored in a given folder? The idea is that that way, I could have xbmc point at that folder and hopefully see faster browsing.

[therionate]

CR2 (raw) files do work under XBMC, only extremely slow. But if there's no support for it, it's not a problem. JPEG's on a local disk however are slow even, not the smoothness you should expect. Tested it on Dharma Final under Ubuntu and OpenELEC (XBMC appliance). Both give the same result.

[johngalt007]

Thank you for confirming the problem. You are right:

1) This has nothing to do with the network or the presence of raw files. In fact, I have disabled raw (.cr2) files in advancedsettings.xml without any positive effect.

2) I copied files on the local hard drive and even they browse as slow.

While searching for a solution to this problem, I found many threads talking about the same problem. This alone has marred what otherwise has been an excellent experience with XBMC. I also have WMC on W7 and surprisingly, this is less of an issue on windows media center. I thought with dharma my quest for a decent, stable, and usable media center s/w had come to an end, but alas no.

Now, I am tempted to buy the boxee box and see if that has this problem.

CR2 (raw) files do work under XBMC, only extremely slow. But if there's no support for it, it's not a problem. JPEG's on a local disk however are slow even, not the smoothness you should expect. Tested it on Dharma Final under Ubuntu and OpenELEC (XBMC appliance). Both give the same result.

[RockDawg]

I just did a test. I took 36 JPG's and copied them to a folder on my server that XBMC accesses via SMB. The pics have a resolution of 3872x2592 and average 4-5MB. XBMC handles these fine for me. Like I said before, it's not lightning fast, but very usable.

Below is a crude Youtube video I made with my cell phone. It gives a good representation of the speed I experience. Notice you can here me tap the keyboard to advance to the next picture and how long it takes to display.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q5XopM99Fs

[splnuts]

I have hated this as well with XBMC. I don't look at pictures that much on my htpc so I never really cared to look for a resolution. Although I would like to find something that would fix/work around this.

[tslayer]

There seems to be nothing in the log that suggests anything odd of this sort. see log here:

http://pastebin.com/embed_js.php?i=RDHjBrwg

You need to enable debug first.