Kodi Community Forum

Hey Guys,

I have a Zotac Mag box, it has the single core processor and 1GB RAM (512MB of which gets devoted to the GPU).

Most of Aeon 65 runs pretty decent, not amazing, but worth putting up with to keep this skin. Where I notice issues is when I'm in the movies or tv list and scrolling through the list of movies.

I have it running in Multiplex view with fanart enabled. When I watch the system process it is pretty much maxing the 512MB of RAM at this point but not really going into the swap space at all, it seems to be turning the RAM over to make room for the new art.

The processor if I'm scrolling as fast as possible polls close to 100% but I've never seen it actually max and it usually goes into the mid 90's only for a bit and only if I'm scrolling as fast as possible.

If it's possible I'd really like to smooth out this scrolling a bit, so I have a couple questions:

1) How much of an overall performance in the skin would I see if I gave this box to the wife and bought the dual core/2GB version. Again I'm mostly happy with the way things are but if the dual core/2GB is going to be night and day better I'll do it np.

2) Would adding RAM help me out in any measurable amount?

3) In this thread: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=59115 they talk about using compressed textures and enabling dds(?) Will this help me out in this cause? I'm worried the increased load on the processor will negate the benefit if it causes it to max.

If there are any other performance enhancing tips I'd sure like to hear them. Thanks guys for any help you could provide.

Its fanart that slows down scrolling in aeon as a test turn off fanart and your see a big difference in scrolling this is why dds files work better as then its the GPU that does the work not CPU only down side dds files are quite a lot larger than jpg

What size screen do you have because limiting fanart to 720 instead of 1080 also gives a performance increase that's what I did on an ION instead of using dds

Thanks for the reply.

I'm running in 1080p, I thought if I set it to 720p in the interface maybe it would run XBMC in 720p but still allow 1080p movies to run in full 1080, but everything seemed to run in 720p after I enabled that.

I'm not worried at all about size really the zotac box has a 160gb drive and I'm using it for nothing but xbmc (installed from a XBMC live version then updated.) So I should be good on space.

I didn't realize DDS offloaded to the GPU, I'll try enabling that for sure. How do I limit fanart to 720p? I don't recall seeing any kind of option for that, or are you referencing just setting the entire thing to 720p as above?

Thanks again!

Amount of RAM needed is heavily dependent on your OS

To limit fanart to any size you add the following in advancedsettings.xml

<fanartheight>720</fanartheight>

Cant remember which build this was introduced in don't think it was in 9.11 maybe someone else can answer that but you don't need to do that if you use dds

This is excellent information, thanks a ton.

Is it worth it/possible to convert backdrops to dds as well even if it had to be manually?

And as I understand it from your post in the 'Speeding up Aeon65' thread, once the dds option has been enabled XBMC will convert all your existing fanart automatically correct?

Thanks again

twitch Wrote:This is excellent information, thanks a ton.

Is it worth it/possible to convert backdrops to dds as well even if it had to be manually?

And as I understand it from your post in the 'Speeding up Aeon65' thread, once the dds option has been enabled XBMC will convert all your existing fanart automatically correct?

Thanks again

Not sure about backdrops but yes in the latest builds it will do it for you if you look in your fanart folder your see it happening it wont be super quick though and it will give you an idea of size difference

\userdata\Thumbnails\Video\Fanart

I don't think it will make use of DDS backdrops unless its compiled into XBMC (a trivial patch from what I understand)

hmm I seem to remember seeing a thread in my reading about dds that someone converted their backdrops to .bmp and that helped.

Do I need to install any packages on my xbmc live setup to get dds to work or just enable the flag in the xml? (I installed from xbmc 9.11 then upgraded to a current svn last weekend.)

edit: appears to need no additional packages. Taking several minutes to generate each .dds file though, but I gots nothing but time as long as it's quicker in the end.

When I'm browsing between movies in my list it seems like it's the tbn files that are slowing it down, is there a way to convert them to a .dds style format as well?


These times are likely exaggerated because the CPU is pinned creating other .dds files now, although browsing doesn't seem that much slower than normal. I guess I don't understand what the fanart .jpg's it's converting to are as opposed to these .tbn files it seems to load when I select a movie. I thought the fanart would be the picture it auto-downloaded and displays as the background in multiplex view then pops the info window over top.

Edit: it appears to be converting the tbn files automatically as well now. I'll stop fricken spamming now until the process finishes. Thanks for your help and patience xbmc folks.