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I'm in the process of putting together an XBMC RPi, which will be used purely for music. I have the setup working but am having a few performance issues. I have found a number of things to try but 1 thing I can't find is what impact the video output settings have when only using the XBMC interface and playing music, not playing videos. Would having it set at the recommended resolution of 1920x cause increased CPU?
According to system information the RPi is currently running at 94% cpu even when doing nothing. I'm hoping that is down to using a wireless dongle and switching to wired ethernet will resolve it, but any other tips would be welcome. I've searched for answers but can't find anything definitive.
Thanks in advance.
Ian
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Sorry, should have said. I purchased RPi XBMC ready installed on an SD card, it is the OpenElec version.
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Running the RPi with no keyboard plugged in and networking through a homeplug it works fine, so I can only assume that the keyboard and wifi dongle were consuming too much power.
I'm still curious to know whether video resolution effects performance. Also, does HDMI consume any power or is that link powered by the TV?
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That CPU you see in the system info page is not accurate. It displays high due to the GUI constantly being refreshed. To accurately check CPU usage, SSH into the pi and run the "top" command. It will (should) be a lot lower than what is displayed in the GUI.
I run a wireless dongle and I don't think it really affects the CPU.
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The GUI is always rendered at 720 for better performance. The video resolution settings won't matter because it's handled by a hardware video decoder, and not the CPU.
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Thanks very much. Maybe the poor performance on wireless was due to having a keyboard plugged in then. Do you run your dongle via a powered hub or just straight into the Pi?
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I'm using a spare iphone charger, which is output rated at 1a, is that enough? Actually I was using a mouse rather than a keyboard,so I wonder if lighting that up could drain power.
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for any USB device I highly recommend to use powered USB hub between if the device is not self powered
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As long as it is an official iphone charger that should be sufficient. Did you try with the res set at 720p instead? Are you overclocked at all?
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2013-03-15, 15:46
(This post was last modified: 2013-03-15, 15:47 by digicammad.)
Cheers. No not overclocked yet, just got ssh sorted today so that is one of the things I will be looking at. Res not at 720 yet.
I also have my resolution set at 720p, not 1080.
