Hellos!
I got a new HTPC yesterday, mainboard AsRock E350M1, APU
Zacate E350. I'm testing the
nightly build from 18-Oct-2011.
I'm noticing that when loading thumbnails of my video collection, especially when scrolling quickly in wall views, the CPU goes to 100% load, thumbnails appear one-by-one, and scrolling sometimes lags extremely. Once the thumbs are loaded, scrolling (one or two rows) is completely smooth, until the next thumbs need to be loaded.
Is it possible that fetching and decoding those thumbnail JPGs uses
that much CPU power? Okay, the E350 is of course not the most powerful CPU, but I figured loading some small image files should not need that much power.
Are there some tweaks I could apply? The box has 4 GB of memory, can XBMC make use of that, by pre-loading thumbs in the background or something?
Thanks in advance for infos!
You should probably keep on updating the nightly build (although that is unreliable - you have to keep that in mind), because the GUI will see lots of improvements for Eden's release which should be around the end of this year.
Those improvements will probably solve that problem.
You may want to try enabling "Dirty Regions" with setting (1) in advancedsettings.xml
This will reduce the CPU load of skins.
Code:
<gui>
<algorithmdirtyregions>1</algorithmdirtyregions>
</gui>
Another things that you can use is use DDS images.
Code:
<advancedsettings>
<useddsfanart>true</useddsfanart>
</advancedsettings>
This will create thumbnails that use your GPU for loading images.
Here's some info one how to use this:
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Adv...ttings.xml
Hey!
Thanks for your replies!
@Henry: Okay, good to know. It's not that the slow loading is a real issue. The GUI itself runs perfectly smooth, only thumbnail loading lags. Movie playback itself is perfect too... 1080p MKVs with 30% CPU load.
It's just that in the long run I'd like a GUI that's as "bling" as possible with the CPU that I got, so I asked for possible tweaks. It's also a bit of a "competition" with those dedicated media player boxes, like Popcorn Hour. I just want to have a better GUI than they have, just because I can.
Big advantage of the Zacate system: very quiet (fan inaudible from further away than 50cm) and 20-30 W power consumption during HD playback, <20 W during XBMC idle.
@Machine: Oh, thanks, I'll try that! I thought the new "dirty regions" feature was active in the Eden nightlies by default. I'll turn that on.
And yep, I already found the "DDS fanart" thing (sorry, I should have mentioned that). Turning it on did change something.
I'm not all positive, but I think it improved the loading speed of thumbnails (before turning it on, they were loaded very very slowly, about 2 thumbs per second), but increased the "jumpyness" of the list when scrolling.
Do you think it's worth a try to test this advancedsettings entry?
Code:
<bginfoloadermaxthreads>
Control the number of threads in the background info loader thread pool
(thumb generagor, flagging, etc). Useful for tuning platforms that are low
on CPU, like Xbox and Intel Atom based systems.
Loc2262 Wrote:@Henry: Okay, good to know. It's not that the slow loading is a real issue. The GUI itself runs perfectly smooth, only thumbnail loading lags. Movie playback itself is perfect too... 1080p MKVs with 30% CPU load.
Yeah, I know what you're hinting at - I had the same "issue" a long time, switching to SSD did the trick for me
Quote:Big advantage of the Zacate system: very quiet (fan inaudible from further away than 50cm) and 20-30 W power consumption during HD playback, <20 W during XBMC idle.
Really? That sound neat
I mean... below 40W is AWESOME for a HTPC - I will have to take a look at it
HenryFord Wrote:Yeah, I know what you're hinting at - I had the same "issue" a long time, switching to SSD did the trick for me
Ooh, seriously? An SSD helped?
Well, actually I
was planning to put an SSD into the HTPC. I have one in my main PC, and I know what an incredible speed boost it gives. It's a 40 GB one and getting too small, so I'll be getting a bigger one for the main PC sometime soon, and was planning to put the 40 GB one in the HTPC.
But then I figured, "if the CPU goes to 100% during load of the thumbnails, the limiting factor is probably the CPU and not the disk loading, so an SSD would not be of much use".
Am I mistaken there?
Quote:Really? That sound neat I mean... below 40W is AWESOME for a HTPC - I will have to take a look at it
Yes, I was very positively surprised by that too. The precise box I ordered is this:
http://www.memo-software.de/Nettop-PC-AM...-M1-Zacate
If you understand sufficient German, you can see what components they use.
Oh, another thing: I used Windows 7 x64 as OS for XBMC. Might that constitute a problem? Should I rather go for x86?