[Dito]

Hi all. New member here, so be gentle!

I was playing around with alternate skins last night, just to see what kind of creative stuff the community has come up with. (I last used XBMC on an Xbox 1 ages ago.)

I've noted that Confluence (the default) runs extremely smoothly and quickly. The others I've tried - Transparency, Xeebo, Cirrus - have a serious lag when going to my Movies or TV libraries. I didn't use my stopwatch, but it's probably 5 to 10 seconds. There's a delay when selecting any main menu item, but the video libraries is where I spend most of my time.

For each skin, I've turned off most of the extras, like animation effects or extra widgets, since I know the ATV2 isn't a processing powerhouse. That doesn't seem to make a difference.

This isn't a complaint, more of a curiosity. What does Confluence do differently that it's so smooth, while these others are sluggish? There's nothing wrong with Confluence, I just like to tinker.

If there's some way these skins need optimizing for the ATV2, I'd even be willing to help do that.

Does anyone understand what's going on here?

[Martijn]

reFocus seems to run "smooth" on ATV2 so i've heard. You can try that one

All these skins use more visual effect and images/overlays in the different vieuws you can't disable.
What you can do is disabling views in skin settings that you don't use. This will help somewhat on the performance side.

[Dito]

Ah, interesting. I've noticed that some of the skins have a large number of views to choose from. So if I choose the one I prefer and toggle the others off, that could make a difference. Interesting indeed.

I thought perhaps the skinners were using images that were too "large" for the ATV2 to handle. Like a really high resolution that has to be scaled down, or a very high color depth - something like that.

I don't know anything about skinning, but I've done plenty of work in Photoshop, etc., so I understand about keeping image file sizes small when necessary.

Perhaps I'll read up on skinning and have a look inside the skins to see what's going on.

Hey, any chance to learn and even maybe contribute, right?

[rcrh]

Hi all. New member here, so be gentle!

I was playing around with alternate skins...

...Does anyone understand what's going on here?

Not sure what each skin is doing differently but I do know that Confluence was written by the development team as the "default" skin. So, you would think it would have all of the inside advantegous.

Have a look at this skin (Quartz)
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...ght=quartz

I think it's even snappier than confluence and keeps the look of your aTV.

[Martijn]

I don't know anything about skinning, but I've done plenty of work in Photoshop, etc., so I understand about keeping image file sizes small when necessary.

Perhaps I'll read up on skinning and have a look inside the skins to see what's going on.

Hey, any chance to learn and even maybe contribute, right?

Well some use shadows, reflections and such overlays. Even the Bluray covers and such cost extra power.