[topfs2]

What about enabling DDS fanart? Would that help with the ATV2, as it does with my ION setup?

Nope, it is directx specific (the codec inside is ok on opengl also), not supported in gles. There are equivalent technologies for gles, this is something which we for sure would like to add for fanart and such. It does not help anything with rendering speed (in theory its worse) but it will decrease load time significantly

[Numus]

They might help if the skin utilize it properly but it also depends quite a bit on the GPU, the one in the beagle it didn't help as much as wanted (50% increase on average in confluence, much higher variance in fps though). When we have time we will most likely try this out. The fixes can't be merged in to mainline atm since it trades GPU for CPU (lots of extra processing to determine what to render) which is obviously far from optimal on the majority of HTPCs atm (ION etc). When we move to a more event driven processing and rendering it can be merged in without any downside on any platform.

What about scaling everything down (textures specifically)...

[ZombieRobot]

ok so i just picked up a ATV 2 and will be jailbreaking today when i pick up a micro usb how am i able to run my Aeon lite skin for testing can we still add zipfiles like on windows or will i have to mess with package/ compile my own i am real keen to see how things run hoping the gui will be all good and wont cripple the ATV if anyone can help im keen to get aeon out there for the ATV users

[sytanek]

ok so i just picked up a ATV 2 and will be jailbreaking today when i pick up a micro usb how am i able to run my Aeon lite skin for testing can we still add zipfiles like on windows or will i have to mess with package/ compile my own i am real keen to see how things run hoping the gui will be all good and wont cripple the ATV if anyone can help im keen to get aeon out there for the ATV users

I'm going to suggest SFTP which is how you would do it on an idevice. Not sure where themes are stored tho.

[eXisTa]

I'm going to suggest SFTP which is how you would do it on an idevice. Not sure where themes are stored tho.

SFTP is indeed the right tool for connecting to iOS-device (in my case a ATV2).
Username: root
Password: alpine
The skin directory for me was:
/Applications/XBMC.frappliance/XBMCData/Addons/skin.confluence/

Update:
Damn, Davilla in on fire! https://github.com/xbmc/atv2/commits/atv2
- Webserver enabled.
- Moved to non-pre Dharma.
- Etc.

[dazex]

I have confirm that skins loaded to these locations work:

/private/var/stash/Applications/XBMC.frappliance/XBMCData/XBMCHome/addons

/private/var/mobile/Library/Preferences/XBMC/addons

When download new skins from within the "Addons" menu, they seem to get save to the second location. So that's possibly where we would want to manually upload skins to IMHO.

-Dazex

[jmarshall]

Note that a potential disadvantage to using PVRTC compressed textures is that the filesize is normally much higher than JPG, so while it may use less memory when loaded (4bpp vs 32bpp - a big saving), it uses more space on disk, and 8GB doesn't go far on ATV2 when you start having lots + lots of thumbs + artwork. Shouldn't be an issue for "average" collections though once the texturecache knows it's limits properly. Also, on ATV2 the decoding of JPG/PNG is HW accelerated.

Another disadvantage is that (like DXT) the texture format is designed for offline compression - i.e. compression is SLOW. I'm also not sure whether decent opensource libraries are available for it.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[davilla]

PVRTC also wants everything to have width == height. crap.

[jmarshall]

That's not all that bad. Power of 2 only as well one presumes. Still, 4bits/pixel at 2048x2048 is still just over half the space than 32bits/pixel at 1280x720.

[mediumdry]

I am going to sell my ATV1 again, as I found the interface too sluggish. I am using the Cirrus skin, which is pretty lightweight, and the only way I got it to work snappy was by simply disabling fanart.

I found that by only using the thumbs for series and movies, I could have an acceptable experience, as long as I made the background for all parts the same (as the loading took too long, 2 seconds or so after moving, same as fanart).

I can't do a tethered jailbreak, so I'm waiting with XBMC on my ATV2 for a bit, but I guess work needs to be done on a skin that does not use fanart, but makes the most out of the thumbs and episode screencaps.

I'm thinking of adjusting the Cirrus skin, although it might be a lot of work.

Try it with the same background pic everywhere, disabling fanart where you can.. depending on your skin you can still get a nice experience, without sluggishness. (I hope )

[DavidA]

I'm going to resurrect this thread. I notice that along the way it's gone from discussing a sluggish GUI to dropping frames in videos. My question is about GUI framerate.

I'm running Feb 8th build on ATV2. Confluence and Mediastream Redux skins. Functionally it's great, but it doesn't have the same GUI feeling as my Xbox1 XBMC. I think it's just framerate. I don't think it's related to keeping things cached in RAM as I see a choppy framerate even without loading anything new in. Even the RSS ticker bar runs at an inconsistent framerate.

So my question is whether the coders have reached the limitations of the hardware or whether there's more work that can be done. Also, if there's anything I can do to configure it. I'd run in a lower res if it helped, but I don't see that option.

I would imagine that the ATV2 has a better CPU and GPU than the Xbox1, but what do I know?

Thanks