[WeirdH]

Hi, I'm scratching my head here. I have an AsRock Vision 137B with an i3 processor, a Samsung Evo 840 and 8GB of RAM. I had been running XBMC Gotham 13.2 for a while, using Aeon Nox 5 without hiccups. Last week I finally updated my installation to Krypton 17.6 Stable, installing every addon and dependency like new, and importing my libraries. Now, my UI (still Aeon Nox, standard from repo) is no longer smooth in scrolling lists or sliding animations.

Is my old (2011) system just not powerful enough anymore for modern Kodi?

I suspect this, because I tried a clean Jarvis 16.1 installation, which showed the same choppiness until I turned of fanart. But it surprises me that an installation of 13.2 would run everything smoothly, with all the same art at 1080p. I´m guessing there´s a lot more going on under the hood..? Also weird: I installed the Horizon skin, which looks to be a lot more demanding than Aeon, but it has significantly less 'stuttering'.

I just want to know for sure if my i3 with SSD should be able to handle Krypton or not. Thanks in advance.

EDIT: I'm running on Windows 7

EDIT2: Here's a capture of Windows Index

[Karellen]

Could you post a Debug Log please.

It might be something as simple as the wrong audio settings. Make sure you are using WASAPI for both Audio Output Device and Passthrough Output Device

[WeirdH]

Could you post a Debug Log please.

 Here's a log of just scrolling through the menu, opening some windows. I hope it's adequate.

[Klojum]

If you use that machine purely for Kodi alone, you might want to try a LibreELEC setup so you will have no distractions from a bloating operating system in the background. Install LibreELEC onto a bootable USB stick and test drive it on your machine. The Nvidia GT425m graphics should still be able to run decently

[WeirdH]

Fair enough, although that would mess with my emulators and webbrowsing a fair bit. But I'm thinking: are Jarvis and Krypton really THAT much more demanding than Gotham, that the simple act of navigating a menu becomes too taxing? Every kind of playback remains as smooth as before. (Scrolling through the Youtube and Retrospect addons also don't seem as problematic.)

[Klojum]

Kodi has become a little more demanding, but not that much.
Skins can have their own 'baggage', so yes, some skins are heavier on the CPU and GPU.
If you try other skins, and those do run fluently, I guess the answer is pretty simple.
AEON Nox may have become a bit more heavy-duty, but other background processes outside Kodi on the Win7 machine can also have their influence.

Test LibreELEC 8.2.5 on a USB with and install AEON Nox, and see what that does.

[WeirdH]

Yeah, I thought as much. However, there seems to be little rhyme and reason to the behaviour I'm seeing. Isn't Aeon Nox 5 Redux supposed to be light weight? Also, for comparison, I just installed 17.6 on a Surface Pro 3. Both my AsRock and the Surface have a Core i3 processor and the Surface even runs at 1440p (as opposed to AsRocks 1080p), and on the Surface there is no frameskip in menus whatsoever! I'm stumped. (EDIT: Surface runs Win10, maybe 7 on the AsRock messes things up?)

The AsRock still has my old XBMC installation present, could that be throwing a wrench in my gears at all?

Will try LibreElec later today, thanks so far for all input!

[jjd-uk]

I was using a AsRock Vision 137B with an i5 up to fairly recently, it was also an Windows 7 install and I don't remember seeing any slowness, although I had removed any unneeded windows services and had Kodi set as the default shell to minimise windows processes. and I also only ever use the default skins. Perhaps it's Aeon that's become more heavyweight? have you tried running the default skin as an comparison?

[WeirdH]

Yes, Estuary does fare a lot better, so it might be down to Aeon for the most part. Problem is that a new skin will impact the WAF around here

And surprise, surprise: on a standalone LibreElec usb-installation, Aeon also works as I would expect it to... So it's probably something Windows related then? Also, does my debug log show anything out of the ordinary? (I still don't know how to properly read those)

[Klojum]

The log does not show anything interesting, as no video was played. And since Windows itself seems to disturb things in the background, that too will not be recorded in the Kodi.log file.

The only notable fact was the name of the user in question having a strange fixation on hair gel.

[WeirdH]

The only notable fact was the name of the user in question having a strange fixation on hair gel.

Would you believe it's part of anagram? :)


I have now set <imageres> and <fanartes> in advancedsettings.xml to 720, which brings me right back to the OG Xbox days (Never noticed how old I was getting until JUST NOW)... It seems to alleviate some of the pressure.

However, since my update, I have been busy setting up 17.6 to closely resemble the 13.2 installation, during which Krypton locked up a few times. This only happened when browsing for images, or when just highlighting some (in Advanced Emulator Launcher). Maybe that's related to anything?

I just had it happen again on repopulating movie posters with the 720 tag: abbreviated debug log here, if applicable. This log also mentions this warning a couple of times:  the python script "C:\Users\Jopie Haargel\AppData\Roaming\Kodi\addons\script.extendedinfo\plugin.py" has left several classes in memory that we couldn't clean up. The classes include: class XBMCAddon::xbmcgui::DialogBusy

Could that be related? Thanks again.

[Klojum]

Please... Never abbreviate, edit or otherwise change log files. Otherwise other people who may want to assist will need to start finding all related puzzle pieces. Not a good idea.

Using 720p pics for posters & fanart as such might speed up the download and caching process a bit (=smaller files), but once they are cached I never noticed a difference.

[WeirdH]

Please... Never abbreviate, edit or otherwise change log files.

Sorry, pastebin said the info was over 1MB and wouldn't let me post it. This is the full version (apparently ubuntu doesn't mind it)

[scott967]

I'm not sure but my guess is you have to rebuild your thumbnail cache, which takes some time at first.

scott s.
.

[WeirdH]

I thought of that too, so I manually went past all entries to ensure all images got cached (got the week off, so yeah... ). It didn't help much.

I'm now wondering about two things:

1. on the Gotham installation, I used the ddsfanart-tag in advancedsettings, which has been removed in Krypton; could that be some sort of culprit? 
   
2. as a test, I disconnected the network cable and rebooted, which resulted in some (but not all) movies from my NAS not displaying their fanart, instead reverting to the skin default background. Should this even happen when the images are cached in \userdata\thumbnails??