[pingomister]

Hi. At this point in time, using the current raspbmc or openelec releases installed on a usb 3.0 stick and overclocking the pi, how does it really perform in browsing a movie library with about 1000-2000 titles? Does anyone have any idea or experience to share? Thanks

[cwide]

I have owned a Pi. Granted, it was a few versions of Openelec ago, but I can tell you that if you are looking for XBMC fluidity then look elsewhere. However, if all you care about is using XBMC and media playback.. then it's great. Maybe if you use no fanart at all it will be ok to browse.

[jammyb]

Crap.

If you just switch the pi on, leave it on the main screen and use the iphone/iPad remote app to scroll through the list and click one and play it [thus doing all the selection off the pi and on the phone/pad screen] then it's not so bad.

But. It's still not fun.

[Mick1152]

It works but the user experience won't be super smooth

a $35 developer board is not a replacement for a good system as your main XBMC system. However, as said above, if you're just looking for a device that will play what you select from the list, then it will do it just fine.

That being said, I have 4 of the Pi's now for various reasons and I love them. Two of them are on each of my kids' TV's in their room. The Pi's are best with one of the list type layouts for the media library so you can browse the lists of movie/tv shows and then let the art load up once you find something you're interested on the list. I've enjoyed mine quite a bit. My first Pi got the duty of being my designated system for my RV for quite a while before I went overboard and built a beast of a system for my RV. It was quite overkill, I don't need perfect fluidity in my library while I'm in the RV but, I got spoiled and it's nice to have.

[pingomister]

I see. So there is no room left for improvement in that area? I've been thinking about getting one, and since I saw a guy's video of aeon nox running on the raspberry pi quite smoothly (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyvJtySBNQg), I was hoping that the fluidity of the UI wouldn't be so bad. But it appears that large libraries are not easily handled. How long from clicking "Movies" until the list shows up in a library with 1500 titles? Any idea?

[voochi]

I see. So there is no room left for improvement in that area? I've been thinking about getting one, and since I saw a guy's video of aeon nox running on the raspberry pi quite smoothly (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyvJtySBNQg), I was hoping that the fluidity of the UI wouldn't be so bad. But it appears that large libraries are not easily handled. How long from clicking "Movies" until the list shows up in a library with 1500 titles? Any idea?

If you want to run Aeon Nox, with a large library, very fast, very smooth, fanart enabled, etc, forget about Raspberry Pi.

Anybody who says it will be fast/smooth is lying, or else they have gotten so used to laggy experience that they forgot what smooth feels like.

[jammyb]

^^^ hear hear!

[Milhouse]

I see. So there is no room left for improvement in that area? I've been thinking about getting one, and since I saw a guy's video of aeon nox running on the raspberry pi quite smoothly (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyvJtySBNQg), I was hoping that the fluidity of the UI wouldn't be so bad. But it appears that large libraries are not easily handled. How long from clicking "Movies" until the list shows up in a library with 1500 titles? Any idea?

There's plenty of room for improvement in several areas.

There is a delay when accessing large libraries, but only because XBMC currently loads the entire library in one go even though the user is only viewing 10 items at a time - a lazy loading solution would ensure that the library size will scale nicely even on low powered devices. Maybe one day such a system will be implemented along with the database redesign.

Many skins are just too "heavy" for the Pi, I tried several but kept coming back to Confluence Modified which works well for me (1GHz 512MB Pi).

I have 630 movies and it takes about 7-10 seconds for the list to appear. On the other hand, browsing TV shows is pretty quick because there is so much less data to load (first you access just the top level TV show items, then drill down into seasons and finally episodes).

[bubblegum57]

I have a Mygica 510b, which has slightly better specs, but originally the performance was crap, since I followed instructions to move the user data to the microsd card, it is now very good.

[pingomister]

Alright, that's what I thought. There's hope that in the future that delay could be overcome with a lazy load solution. I wonder, is anyone developing skins specifically for the raspberry pi? Could this be implemented with skinning in the current xbmc version?

There's plenty of room for improvement in several areas.

There is a delay when accessing large libraries, but only because XBMC currently loads the entire library in one go even though the user is only viewing 10 items at a time - a lazy loading solution would ensure that the library size will scale nicely even on low powered devices. Maybe one day such a system will be implemented along with the database redesign.

Many skins are just too "heavy" for the Pi, I tried several but kept coming back to Confluence Modified which works well for me (1GHz 512MB Pi).

I have 630 movies and it takes about 7-10 seconds for the list to appear. On the other hand, browsing TV shows is pretty quick because there is so much less data to load (first you access just the top level TV show items, then drill down into seasons and finally episodes).

[mdleal82]

I ditched the Pi because of lag and all the hoops I had to jump through to manage it and set it up. I setup an old c2d laptop running Windows 7 to replace it. One thing i did like about the the Pi was CEC.