[gaiko]

I have a MSI U230 (win7 x64, 2gb mem) and want to use it for XBMC. I have been quite happy with the speed of the video playback (pretty darn good actually, knock on wood) *but* the GUI is quite slow. When going from TV prog to prog (down the list) or moving between menus it is slow, there is a small lag and the loading of the graphics for shows is even slower.

I am currently playing my videos through my network (DNS-323 NAS through my gigabit router) and I have all the videos setup with graphics/info files etc on the on my NAS which i thought might explain the slow graphics (like posters etc) but the video plays just fine (it is unclear to me if XBMC makes a local DB if the nfo/graphics files are on a network. I have hardware acceleration enabled and am not sure what else to do.


Cheers,


-Gaiko

[snowy]

hi, i'm experiencing something similar. About a 2 second delay loading the fan art etc when i scroll from movie to movie.

I'm wondering...would using an SSD drive improve things? Or installing more ram? I have a revo 3610 with 2 gigs. Streaming movies from over a network but i'm presuming all the fan art etc is downloaded directly onto the htpc (revo). Sorry to hijack the thread, but seeing as we're experiencing a similar problem, i hope you don't mind.

[gaiko]

hi, i'm experiencing something similar. About a 2 second delay loading the fan art etc when i scroll from movie to movie.

I'm wondering...would using an SSD drive improve things? Or installing more ram? I have a revo 3610 with 2 gigs. Streaming movies from over a network but i'm presuming all the fan art etc is downloaded directly onto the htpc (revo). Sorry to hijack the thread, but seeing as we're experiencing a similar problem, i hope you don't mind.

Hey, no problem. I was considering making a ramdrive and putting the xbmc database on the ramdrive to see if that would speed things up or maybe mem... anywho glad to know I am not the only one

[snowy]

apparently this might help but to be honest, it looks a bit tricky for me, dealing with complicated 3rd party programs / batch files / codes and the like...

[snowy]

incidentally, i'm using the alaska skin, which i find quite snappy on the whole. the slowless is mainly when i have the dvd panel view set, with the fan art on the left hand side / background. If i select fanart panel view, then the background etc loads immediately when i flick between films, because it's already cached i presume. Whereas in the other mode it's only initially loading and caching the covers, and not the fan art.

[>>X<<]

apparently this might help but to be honest, it looks a bit tricky for me, dealing with complicated 3rd party programs / batch files / codes and the like...

That post is more than a year old all you need to do now is add the advancedsetting and XBMC will convert them for you and to answer the first post all images are cached locally and its those that are converted note this takes quite some time and generates much larger files

If the MSI U230 has an ati card its worth turning on debug to make sure its not running at 100% in the GUI

[gaiko]

That post is more than a year old all you need to do now is add the advancedsetting and XBMC will convert them for you and to answer the first post all images are cached locally and its those that are converted note this takes quite some time and generates much larger files

If the MSI U230 has an ati card its worth turning on debug to make sure its not running at 100% in the GUI

Thanks Snowy, I'll check out Alaska (have heard good things about it).

>>X<<, my MSI does indeed have an ATI card so thanks for the debug idea (I shoulda thought of that) i'll try it soon as i get home! So if all the files are stored locally, would i get any benefit by reencoding all my tbn/jpg files at a lower quality? I might give the DXT1 option a try later but I am not too hip on taking up much more space (its a wee hard drive and with 3.5tb of tv shows/movies on my NAS that could make for an even larger than i would like DB)(thx for mentioning the size caveat)

[&gt;&gt;X&lt;&lt;]

Posters are already cached at a smaller size but you can change this with a setting in advancedsettings.xml 512 is the default

Code:

<thumbsize>512</thumbsize>

You can also do the same with fanart my parents have an Asrock ION and I have theirs cache fanart at 720p which made quite a difference

Code:

<fanartheight>???</fanartheight>

dds is the best option as it takes the load off the CPU you could always give it a try and check the size difference before and after your find them in

\userdata\Thumbnails\Video\Fanart

Don't touch source images keep them at their maximum quality

[snowy]

so literally all i have to do with xmbc 10 is add

<useddsfanart>true</useddsfanart>

to my advanced settings xml and i'm sorted?

[steppedup]

Yep....and my understanding is that you have to browse through library to generate them.

[snowy]

Works a treat!

You do have to manually scroll through your entire movie collection after you put that little code in. And then restart xbmc and then the images all load instantly! This is awesome!! XBMC is finally perfect!

op - try this!

[snowy]

hmmn, did i speak too soon? It seems perfect for like the first 40 movies in my list, but after 'c' things are as they used to be, despite the fact that i've scrolled through them all. Any ideas??

[&gt;&gt;X&lt;&lt;]

It takes quite a long time to encode the .dds file you cant just add the setting and then scroll through your movies and expect them all to be done straight away you need to leave it for a while

Check in the below location and your see whether you have as many dds files as you do tbn

\userdata\Thumbnails\Video\Fanart

on top of that there's all the poster dds that need to be done also this all takes time, and it will make a difference because you GPU does the work and not the CPU

[steppedup]

I wrote a quick How-To on how to do convert the *.jpg's to *.dds this via a script that I found on another XBMC thread.

Hope it helps!

[snowy]

sweet, this is now working fine! thanks