I recently upgraded my media center to frodo. Ive run into a bunch of problems in the process and i just cannot figure this one out. Im using the confluence skin and have the option to display recently added movies and tv shows on. So on the main menu there thumbnails of those recently added files at the top when you hover the respective menu option. Those thumbnails take about a minute to load. The thumbnails for the addon shortcuts take just as long. When browsing the library posters and fanart take a while to load but not usually as slow as the main menu stuff. There is also a significant (about 5 seconds) lag between hovering a different library item and the posters and fanart changing.
Im using a MySQL database that is hosted on this same computer. All paths are via smb. I had this same setup with eden and thumbnails loaded fine. And as far as i know thumbnails are always local files, so its a ridiculous amount of time for a couple kilobyte file to be read.
Looking at the log the only thing i notice are a few entries with CImageLoader saying how long it took to display a thumbnail, but it doesnt make an entry for each thumbnail. For this log all i did was start xbmc, move around on the main menu so it would show the thumbnails, and then exit.
http://xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=8927
Problem Solved
I got fed up with this and trying to fix it so i decided to downgrade back to eden, where lo and behold the problem still persisted. I was baffled. So i tried numerous things, including uninstalling and reinstalling the .net framework, defragging the hard drive (it was less than 1% fragmented), deleting every trace of xbmc and installing fresh. No matter what i did thumbnails were still taking 20-30 seconds to load. Even after loading once, going to a screen they werent on, and going back it still took 20-30 seconds to load. So i started looking through old threads and found this
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=64808 where someone says to use the option that runs xbmc as a window instead of fullscreen. Instantly eden was working flawlessly again. So i figured i should upgrade to frodo again since this is probably the only issue, and of course frodo works fine now too. The only strange thing is if i turn on fullscreen again the thumbnails still load quickly, i cant reproduce it.
So what seems to have fixed the issue was running xbmc in windowed mode, but i cant reproduce it by going back to fullscreen. If anyone else has this issue, try what i tried.
Hi Mate,
Ive also been having the same issue as you. On my movies menu page i have a Latest movies Widget and in Eden the thumbnails were instantly showing when opening up xbmc, but with Frodo they are taking ages to come in!
I am already and have always been in windowed mode though, so it cant be that!
thanks mate will give that a try. But i highly doubt it will effect my setup, as my HTPC is only a few months old with core i5 processor. Will still try it though.
Ok i tried various things such as setting those options in the advanced settings xml and also changing from fullscreen to window mode and back etc...
Nothing works, for the latest movies widget thumbnails are still taking more then 10-15secs to appear.
Anyone have any idea?
Try making a backup of your user folder for xbmc and then deleting the original so it remakes it with default settings and no content, if its still slow after changing to windowed mode then you may need to try following the steps i took to fix the problem.
Its a wierd one, as i just noticed that its actually only the latest movies widget thumbnails that are taking long to load, if i actually go straight to a movie category (ie. latest) all the covers are visible straight away! ??
Latest movies widget is the only one i currently have on the menu screen, so i havnt tested it with other widgets yet.
Also how long is too long? At the moment it seems to be taking just over 10secs from once xbmc is loaded, however with eden im sure it was instant - (could that be because eden stored images locally and my frodo could be getting the images from the NAS Server SQL database?)
Thanks
Frodo stores all images locally as well, if you use mysql then it stores the url to the image in the database and every client then downloads its own thumbnail copies. Do the thumbnails take just as long to load if you go to a different screen and then back to the home screen? If its only at startup then its likely just that you have a lot of scripts running when xbmc starts and the command to fetch the latest movies is at the end of that queue.