[Marvel]

Is there somewhere to download the first release of MQ2? Then I can run some comparisons.

At the moment I have a brand new install of dharma and aeon loaded with default settings, so that rules out old settings and files etc being left behind from upgrading and whatnot.

Cheers

[The-Boxhead]

Very nice work on the new version !

However there is problems, i to get a lot of delays when activating stuff from the home menu, takes about 3-4 seconds each time i select music, videos, movies or whatever... Also coming back to the main menu causes hangs and sluggish performance.

The old version you had didn't have any of this problems, so as it is now the skin becomes a pain to use. Don't know why the performance is so bad but might be hard/easy to fix ?

I could post a debug log of a 2 minuts run and see what happens...

[ubuntuf4n]

Same over here, it runs fairly sluggish.

[MarcosQui]

For those who are having problem with delay, please test the files below:

http://mod-skin.googlecode.com/files/720p.zip

Attention BETA files only for testing, make a copy of the original before.

I await feedback from you.

Another thing, there was no decision on the cut on personalization, do or not do?

Consider that if the delay in version 2.5.1 of the skin was normal then the customization is not to blame for this.

Note:
The skin is always developed and tested using the official version and Windows 7, just so I can guarantee my work, if you use another system or another version of XBMC is susceptible to bugs.

[pettson3816]

im still experiencing black backdrops with version 260 ...

please fix this issue...

thanks

Me too. Have no idea what's causing it..

[ndeshmukh]

I am not sure exctly what mechanism is followed for uncompressing an xbt file when a skin is running... but i have an inkling that the larger xbt file is not desirable.

Skins and there .xbt files...

Aeon MQ 2 - 200 MB
Shade - 84 MB
Transparency SVN - 75 MB
Night SVN - 40 MB
Xperience SVN 32 MB
Alaska - 12 MB

If people are anyways going to use there on backdrops for menus, then I think those backdrops should be removed from XBT... but that in itself is no going to totally help... that would just be a tiny fraction...

So what else has an effect on its size? The more the number of views?

If I have only a couple of views enabled can there be a script to generate a smaller XBT from the larger one?



Anyways this the only skin that I have stayed at longer than a couple of days before returning to Confluence as usual... btw these days it is the customizable confluence mod for me rather than the bundled confluence.

[ndeshmukh]

Sorry for the typos in the previous post...

On a side note... One thing in confluence that I really like other than the vertical menu (which is one of the biggest reasons that I keep returning to it) is the small strip of three buttons in the lower left corner for favorites, shutdown, and play disc.

BTW none of them is really used often, and can be mapped to buttons on the remote, but even buttons on the remote are at a premium.

Having them in the menu just increases the number of menu items that it practically becomes difficult to find things. Especially if one wants to have extra customizable menus.

So some suggestions... just what i think i might like if they were there...

1. Obviously the option of a vertical menu like confluence... maybe I will be told to go elsewhere for suggesting this...

2. If not a small strip of buttons like confluence for things like shutdown, favorites, play disc etc, things for which especially a small icon suffices easily to say what its purpose is...

3. I think a human brain has been over the years trained to read stuff scrolling smoothly either vertically or horizontally. But the menu bar moves not smoothly but jerkily, cause it immediately moves to the next item. This makes it difficult to read and search for the menu entry when things scroll horizontally more so than vertically.

Maybe I got used to confluence and it will take a while to do so for a horizontal menu.

3.1 A horizontal menu like shade with the icons so that more menu entries are visible simultaneously on the screen.

3.2 Instead of the whole menubar moving left/right and the higlighted item in the center, move the the highlight left/right and scroll the menu only when you reach the left/right edge.

4. I think currently there is only one view "Wide" for TV shows which can use "Banners". But that really covers the whole screen and hides the fanart, maybe it can be altered a little bit... ideally a "low list" view which could use banners.

5. Play video in background or window when one returns to the gui... currently I can only hear the audio but I see fanart of the items in the gui, rather than the video.

6. The customized menu item does not let me have sub menus as favorites if the menu item and vice versa. Can the option to have them mixed be possible?

7. I have the sub folder "Hulu Movies" & "Hulu TV Shows" from the Hulu addon as favorites. I can see them when i select them from the favurites menu, but if I add them as sub menu items to the home screen, I get an error to the effect "Library empty. Please populate from the home screen"


Maybe I missed some settings, and all/some of what I said is already possible.

Thanks alot for all your effort.

[The-Boxhead]

Basicly i think that 200MB skin is just to large.

My suggestion is to strip away and downscale must stuff to 720p
Maybe have two version, one that is superfast with less bells and whistles and
another one that is the monster with all the bells and whistles. Is it possible
to do this trough theme ? one small theme with a light footprint and a large
theme ? Or is the best to have two seperate skins ? MQ2 light and MQ2 full ?

If time allows i would possible do a mod and strip down and fasten up MQ2 and rel it as a mod...

I also wonder what makes the 200MB size ? is there many 1080p backdrops in the mediafolder or are there just many png's with high quality that takes up all this space ?

[Galactus]

I see that the themes are installed automatically on a windows machine by clicking on the exe. How do you install the theme on a machine running Live?

On the size issue: I know Marcos has taken steps to reduce the size already. Personally it does not bother me at all. Its quick on my Acer Revo. And, with connection speeds and disk space the way they are now its not a big deal IMO.

[The-Boxhead]

Well im on Linux Karmic running Dharma 10 final.
I have and ION box with SSD drive.

Disk space is not the issue with large size
The issue is rather that xbmc skin engine chokes on to large media files...

[ndeshmukh]

BTW if you have your profile folder say on an ssd does the slowness go away? Anybody with an ssd?

Edit: Oops just did not see the post before mine

[eskro]

i agree with the idea of 2 different versions MQ2 720P and MQ2 1080P ....

Lite version could perhaps help with menu delays and stuff....

another thing is the menu backdrops suddently not 'appearing' making the background black...

i hope this can be fixed soon....

i recall that running the XBT uncompressed kinda resolved the issue here...

thanks

[boykster]

For anyone having slowness issues since updating from 2.5 I STRONGLY suggest you do a purge of your guisettings.xml file and start fresh. I just did a test on my second XBMC machine

Entering Movies list (full library) times:

2.52 - 3.2 seconds
2.6 without guisettings purge: 7.1 seconds
2.6 with clean guisettings file: 3.4 seconds

There are several ways to 'purge' your guisettings file:

1. simply delete it and have it re-created again. upside is this is simple. downside is that you will lose ALL of your xbmc settings

2. open the file guisettings.xml in an editor and clear out all of the values between

<skinsettings> and </skinsettings> (leave the tags)

This will clear all of your skin customizations so you'll have to re-set everything, but it might make things faster by clearing out all of the old version of aeonmq settings.

before you do anything, make sure you backup your guisettings.xml file in case something goes awry.

[MarcosQui]

2.52 - 3.2 seconds
2.6 with clean guisettings file: 3.4 seconds

And most still think it is the fault of the skin.

[ndeshmukh]

For the same internationalization settings...

Language: English US
Region: USA
Character Set: Default

Confluence is able to properly show cyrillic whereas aeon mq2 shows blanks

Any ideas how to fix this? It has been asked for earlier in this thread without a response. Or at least I did not find the response.