Kodi Community Forum

Hey everyone,

I am new to XBMC. Have been using Media Browser and Media Center Master on top of Windows Media center for a few years. I have been hearing good things about XBMC and wanted to try it out. I searched the forums and didn't find a solution to my problem.

It seems that when browsing through my movies directory (500+ titles) there is considerable lag with anything but the default confluence skin. I can scroll through 3 or 4 titles, then it will freeze for like 5-6 seconds, and catch up. This makes it rather difficult with the number of titles in the library. Video and everything else works fine.

Are there setting in these other skins that can fix this?

I am running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit with an AMD Phenom II x4 945 @ 3Ghz, 4Gig Ram on an ATI Radeon HD 5570.
This is the latest stable build 12.2

If Confluence is working fine, then most skins for the same build should work well too. When you have 500+ titles, are they all in one flat file or do you have the collection divided into sub folders with each movie in it's own folder named as the movie (date). It's much easier even for your O/S to have 50-100 titles per source, reading the directory etc is much more efficient.

The size of artwork, and your gfx set-up matter a lot, give the system time to pre-cache various sources and through put from your hard drives can prove crucial. Many suggest an SSD eliminates most of these browsing delays with a compatible skin.

Using the debug mode, have a look at the time sequence with an editor to determine your bottle necks. I love the skin Transparency! and it seems to runs as quickly as Confluence no matter how heavy the artwork load. Be sure the skin you choose is not at fault and is supported by the latest stable ver of XBMC , nor some obscure setting within the skin.

Thanks for the reply Pat,

It turns out that Confluence doesn't work all that well either. I have each title organized in its own folder in the directory. Many of the titles contain trailer files and metadata from the media browser and media center master, as well as a few background images, none of which are all that big.

I am not sure where XBMC stores its meta data/image files, but I recall the Media Center master had all kinds of settings related to the number of image files and the quality/resolution of them. I ran to a bit of trouble using the default settings with that software originally too, but haven't been able to find similar options in XBMC.

I am sure that there must be some configuration change that can be made to resolve this, since if it can be run on RasPi (which I have and plan to get setup after this is figured out) It should be able to run on this hardware.

Strangely, like I said before, the movie files themselves play perfectly, just the front end interface is problematic.

I've pretty much have your hardware set-up and everything here is pretty smooth with 10X the library. I suspect there is some sort of issue going on in the background in which XBMC is stumbling through. The best way to diagnose this is to turn on >settings>system>debugging and enable debugging which will create a comprehensive log at C:\Users\PatK\AppData\Roaming\XBMC (exit XBMC, delete the existing log) restart XBMC with debug enabled. This will give you a time stamp on each operation and some of the tasks it is doing when it shouldn't. Post this log to http://xbmclogs.com/ and leave a link in this thread to that post if you need help.

Your data/image files are kept C:\Users\PatK\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\userdata XBMC has developed to the point I no longer use 3rd party scraper systems, they're buggy, overkill, and just don't keep up with XBMC builds while XBMC hasn't failed to offer all the options I need.

Yup, your logic is sound... If it can run well on RasPi it should be swimming on your hardware. I suggest you give T! a shot.

I dumped the log here: http://xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=69457
I didn't see anything outstanding, but like I said, I'm new to this. Any help would be appreciated.

Noting of note: 15:21:56 to 15:22:03 or 5 seconds.. would be a bit faster if there was .nfo files for these and didn't have to exit to search DEBUG: scraper: CreateSearchUrl returned <url>http://api.themoviedb.org/3/search I would suggest you change to the universal scraper and use the IMDB option and manually scrape these listings.

WARNING: No information found for item 'C:\Movies\Cashback (2007)\Cashback (2004).avi'
No NFO file found. Using title search for 'C:\Movies\Cashback (2007)\Cashback
No information found for item 'C:\Movies\Alpha Dog (2006)\Alpha Dog (2006).avi', it won't be added to the library.
No NFO file found. Using title search for 'C:\Movies\CKY Documentary (2001)\CKY Documentary (2001).avi'
No NFO file found. Using title search for 'C:\Movies\Insomniac with Dave Attell (2003)\Insomniac with Dave Attell (2001).avi'
No NFO file found. Using title search for 'C:\Movies\Jay and Silent Bob Get Old - LIVE!!\Jay.and.Silent.Bob.Get.Old.2012.avi'
No NFO file found. Using title search for 'C:\Movies\My Sassy Girl (KOREAN)\My Sassy Girl (2008).iso'
No NFO file found. Using title search for 'C:\Movies\Sid and Nancy (1987)\Sid And Nancy (TUS Release).bin'
No NFO file found. Using title search for 'C:\Movies\Solitary Man (2009)\Solitary Man (2009).avi'
No NFO file found. Using title search for 'C:\Movies\Stranger Than Fiction (2005)\Stranger than fiction (2005).avi'
No NFO file found. Using title search for 'C:\Movies\The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011)\The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011).avi'
No NFO file found. Using title search for 'C:\Movies\The Transformers (2007)\Transformers (2007).avi'

15:22:03 to 15:22:10 for some sort of audio initialization.... which takes 7 secs! you might have a look at the thread. http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=146911 and see if everything looks jake.

These files seem be causing issues... take them out of the database temporarily

WARNING: could not find codec parameters for C:\Movies\American Movie (1999)\American Movie (1999).bin
15:22:10 T:4484 DEBUG: CThumbExtractor:oWork - trying to extract filestream details from video file C:\Movies\Van Wilder 2, The Rise of Taj (2006)\Van Wilder 2- The Rise of Taj (2006).bin
15:22:10 T:4436 NOTICE: VideoInfoScanner: Finished scan. Scanning for video info took 00:13

and it looks like you have a few corrupt graphics...This is taking a lot of time and CPU, You might be better of deleting the thumbnails and let the system rebuild. C:\Users\Andrew\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\userdata\thumbnails You might get a bit of relief turning off scanning on start if you have it on... Settings>videos>library

ERROR: ffmpeg[131C]: [IMGUTILS] Picture size 0x0 is invalid
15:22:10 T:4892 ERROR: ffmpeg[131C]: [bintext] get_buffer() failed
15:22:10 T:4892 DEBUG: ffmpeg[131C]: [bin] decoding for stream 0 failed

ERROR: ffmpeg[1184]: [IMGUTILS] Picture size 1280x41893344 is invalid
15:22:10 T:4484 DEBUG: ffmpeg[1184]: [NULL] ignoring invalid width/height values

Anytime you have the word 'Error' that's enough for XBMC to choke... I suspect this is the real villain ERROR: ffmpeg[13E8]: [IMGUTILS] Picture size 1280x42024112 is invalid, finding it might be a trick. But I'm not sure how XBMC deals with .bin movies (I don't have any).

After you clean up a bit, put this code in your C:\Users\ANDREW\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\userdata\advancedsetting.xml file it will help.

<gui>
<algorithmdirtyregions>1</algorithmdirtyregions>
<nofliptimeout>1000</nofliptimeout>
</gui>

Thanks Pat! Your post helped a lot. Because of your post, the first thing I looked at was the audio settings, which were set to analog out by default. Strangely enough, the audio still worked, but changing it to HDMI audio fixed all the lag. I've always had problems with the onboard sound in this setup. For a long time the HDMI audio would not be recognized after waking up from sleep mode, and I either had to reboot or unplug and re-plug the HDMI. Should have known. Your assistance is greatly appreciated and I hope to become a helpful member of the XBMC community. Off to get my RasPi build up and running.
Thanks again,
~~Andrew