[hogfan]

Does anybody who has been running one of these for awhile have and recommendations for speeding up the GUI in XBMC. I haven't had much luck using dirty regions or anything like that. I know the processing power is not huge on this thing, but my little Revo box (my main XBMC box) it MUCH snappier in the GUI then the AppleTV2. Playback on the AppleTV2 is fine for me. It's just the slowness in the GUI that bugs me. I'm using the Simplicity skin. AppleTV 2 is in the bedroom, and Revo is in my living room. AppleTV 2 is not fun for navigating TV Shows . Any suggestions appreciated.

-hogfan

[canadave]

simplest way is to simply try a different skin. I use reFocus and the GUI works quite speedily IMO.

[cosmicr]

I used xeebo for quite some time (6 months), but then went back to confluence. It's not as zippy as a pc, but I'm happy with it.

[campincrazy]

Quartz works very well and is consistent with the original apple interface so makes it family friendly.

[mrpreston]

Quartz works very well and is consistent with the original apple interface so makes it family friendly.

Quartz is great, however I like quartz v2 right now, both nice and fast on atv2's, with 5tb library

[jj702]

refocus here, no real issues with speed. I would turn off the background art though, that can slow things down.

[canadave]

refocus here, no real issues with speed. I would turn off the background art though, that can slow things down.

FWIW I run reFocus with background art enabled and experience no performance slowdowns at all.

[hogfan]

Ok, I will have go give refocus a try. I figure Simplicity would be a good choice since it's a more basic skin. I run Metropolis on my Revo box now. I like Neon also, but I'm looking for a good middle ground skin for the AppleTV.

-hogfan

[MSMoney]

I am currently running ATV2 IOS4.4.4 Jailbroken with SeasonPass with the following installed:
ATVFlash Black 1.2 (No Media Player installed)
BTSack for Apple Keyboard
Overflow
Eden Beta 3 ("Official Release - no nightly updates)
Confluence Skin
Wireless N 5G
MacMini Early 2009 2.26C2D 4GB (sharing via smb 6@2Tb Seagate 3.5 Freeagent Desk connected via powered USB hub)

With 4Tb of Movie (coverflow w/Fanart-Posters) and 6Tb TV Shows (Media Info2 w/Fanart-Posters) the interface is slow but fully functioning with no crahes so far. With fanart turned off speed increases (marginally) and with all art turned off and List View fairly speedy but no where near the Macmini speed. But then, we only have 512K of Operating Memory. Everthing up 720P mkv play just fine . 1080P MKV played fine with ATVFlash Media player, but required constant buffering interuptions on wireless with XBMC. I have yet to hard wire the ATV2 since it is in an upstairs bedroom, which may help with the buffering. But I do believe most slow downs will be related to library size/art work and the limited amount memory availlable to operate in.

[Maetrik]

I'd suggest to reduce fanartsize to 512 in advancedsettings.xml and rescan the entire library. Backup first in case you are not happy with the result. (You also can reduce thumbs to 256 but that brought not that much here and they looked awful afterwards). I use reduced fanartsize in combination with dirtyregions and i'm happy with that. Of course its not that snappy as it is on my MacBook, but its ok and it works.

[pecinko]

Does anybody who has been running one of these for awhile have and recommendations for speeding up the GUI in XBMC. I haven't had much luck using dirty regions or anything like that. I know the processing power is not huge on this thing, but my little Revo box (my main XBMC box) it MUCH snappier in the GUI then the AppleTV2. Playback on the AppleTV2 is fine for me. It's just the slowness in the GUI that bugs me. I'm using the Simplicity skin. AppleTV 2 is in the bedroom, and Revo is in my living room. AppleTV 2 is not fun for navigating TV Shows . Any suggestions appreciated.

-hogfan

From my experience dirty regions does not help much on ATV2. Main speed issue is fanart and/or heavy skin related.

[hogfan]

@Maetrik

Can you post your Dirty regions settings from you advancedsettings.xml? I have been playing with that some, but haven't seen much improvement, and a lot of flickering during navigation. Also, resizing fanart in the advancedsettings.xml file doesn't actually touch the files themselves, correct? That only tells the local XBMC to display them at that size. I ask because I am using Pathsubstitution to redirect my thubmnails folder to a network share, since I am using a central MySql DB.

-hogfan

[Maetrik]

I use:

Code:

<gui>
        <algorithmdirtyregions>3</algorithmdirtyregions>
        <nofliptimeout>0</nofliptimeout>
    </gui>

You wont see (and wont feel) a difference until you look at "top" in ssh. It reduces CPU usage.

For smaller fanarts:

Code:

<fanartheight>540</fanartheight>

For making reduced fanartsize effective, you have to rescan your content because the already scanned files wont reduce just by this setting. They definetly have to be re-downloaded/rescraped. I exported them seperately, deleted my (also shared mySQL) database and did a rescan. Now the fanarts are much smaller but still look good and do load faster. But again: Backup first just in case you're not happy with the result.

[westcoastbias]

So I am fiddling with these skins trying to get my atv2 snappier, but for some reason it messes with my fanart. For instance when I browse through the list of tv shows the image for the tv show is compressed on the x axis. How can I fix this?

[hogfan]

I've played with several skins and get quite a few crashes in TV Shows (ie. Backrow, Neon, Simplicity). However, I tried Transparency by Ronie on my Apple TV 2, which a very Fanart heavy skin, and it actually runs much smoother than the others. Seems very strange to me. Playback is excellent, but the XBMC menus are almost unacceptably slow on AppleTV 2. Any ideas?

-hogfan