So for as long as I can remember there has always been a delay when I start to scroll through my TV Episodes or Movies. The banners for TV shows tend to be black for a second with just text of the show name before loading the actual banner image. It pretty much does this for each page as I scroll. Similarly it does the same thing for movie posters while scrolling through those.
I was wondering what, if anything, I can do to fix this situation. It is caused by the HDD that my media is on running slow? I am considering putting an SSD in the system for the boot drive that has Windows/XBMC installed but no media would be on it so I was not sure if this would help at all.
Any suggestions to improve this would be greatly appreciated.
Quote:an SSD in the system for the boot drive that has Windows/XBMC
Indeed an SSD in your system will help a lot. XBMC has most of your graphics stored within and it sounds like there is a bottle neck with fetching gfx. Not all the slow down is due to moving files from the drive to the screen, some of this is the GPU's responsibility and of course the amount of graphic memory available. If the gfx card has enough ram, it can keep more gfx available on demand, if you have a fast gpu, then the images get thrown to the screen double time, but if in all this you still have to squeeze your HD for the gfx.. then that is the pinch. Money well spent I would say... just be sure that your gfx card meets the muster too (supports hardware acceleration?).
I had enough free ram, to experiment with a 'ram drive' and stuffed most of my XBMC graphics into it, the covers just plain flew faster than I could move the screen, (well they were in ram) as compared to fetching up from HD.
I'm often presented with budget eccono desktops, that share video ram with limited o/s ram, and often see diskcaching of live memory of a half a gig or more, and they want XBMC to fly. Don't pigs fly?
I have an SSD and there is still a slight lag at times. Nothing more than half a second to a second though.
Well I grabbed an SSD but have yet to install it. Looking forward to that. I hope it helps.
I don't know much about my video card but I know I have
ATI Radeon HD 6450. It has 1GB of RAM. I have 8GB of system RAM. Would that be enough to play around with a RAM drive? If so, how big should it be? And finally, how do you control where the images/covers/posters are stored? Mine are all stored currently with my media in the appropriate folders but did not realize they can be placed elsewhere.
Hopefully you'll be in for a pleasant experience, there is a bit of effort to setting one up check this thread
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=95334 it's not good to use a ram drive without a large amount of ram (I have 12 gigs and ran out) your posters and fanart can take a lot of room, and that's why the SSD is the preferred method. Looking at your Roaming XBMC folder will tell you how much you'll need outside of your programs XBMC folder. The library images are stored internally within the roaming XBMC folder,
Quote:Mine are all stored currently with my media in the appropriate folders
you may have exported your gfx to separate folders, but XBMC uses images located C:\Users\Your Computer Admin Name\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\userdata\Thumbnails.
Your Graphic card would seem to be better than mine... enjoy.
PatK thanks for your help so far already. I got my SSD installed and definitely see a difference which is great. There is no noticeable lag with banners at all.
I do have questions about thumbnails and nfo files. I currently have sickbeard and couchpotato download all banners/posters/nfo/etc upon completion of a download and that is why there are copies with all my media files. Should I turn that off and just let XBMC download that stuff itself? Based on your post about the roaming folder I am wondering if I am just wasting space by having SB/CP put all these files in with my media. Are they even being used for anything at all? Is there any point in having it put the NFO with these files or is that a waste too and also stored somewhere else by XBMC?
Any info is greatly appreciated!
The one useful thing with art being beside your media is that multiple clients can get it from that location (rather than the web) and the data is likely more stable than URLs from websites for the case where the data has to be re-grabbed.