HD Extender Interface Speed

[Muchacho]

Overall I am very happy with the HD extender- everything just seems to work well without having to tweak and the video quality is much better than from my 8600 GT...

However, when scrolling through my music and videos, the UI response is very slow- slower than on the regular MVP. I use sageMC, but I have the same problem with the default stv. My music library is quite large and I typically page up/down to navigate. It hangs for 5-10 sec frequently when paging up/down. I have tried disabling animations and that did not seem to make a difference.

Has anyone else experienced this and is this abnormal?

Thanks!

[Opus4]

Do you have large thumbnails? Try setting this property:

ui/enable_hardware_scaling_cache=true

Correction: put this property in the server's sage.properties file.

- Andy

[Muchacho]

Thanks-

That did speed up the videos, but my music is still very slow. How long does it take you to scroll though say 200 artists? It would take me over a min.

Mike

[Opus4]

I don't now how long it should take to scroll through a long list of artists (you could check with text support to see if they know a way to speed it up more), but if I don't want to actually read each page's content, I just use the hidden extras and turn on Quick Filtering so all I have to do is use the number pad to start entering the name of whatever I'm looking for.

- Andy

[sakker]

Is there a setting that I can't think of that I might change that could possibly fix this?

When browsing media center or recording/videos it pulls up the thumbnails of the movies. I browse by folder and save each movie to it's own folder with a thumbnail of the same name. On my mvp's I can scroll all the way down to the bottom of the list quickly and the thumbnails catch up as they load, usually takes 1 or 2 seconds. On the HD extender it will only scroll to the next line of movies, load those thumbnails, then allow you to go to the next row of movies, load those thumbnails, etc. So it takes longer than I am willing to wait to get to the end.

At first, when the thumbnails load you can move around the loaded thumbnails freely and smoothly. After going scrolling down 2 or 3 of the rows that need to load, then each move left/right/up/down takes approximately 5 seconds or so, even if the thumbnail is on screen.

I've uninstalled Sage and reinstalled without SageMC and it does the same thing. If I plug the mvp in it loads just like normal, HD extender, super slow.

Support told me to try to reload the default stv which I had already tried and I don't really want to wait another 24 hours for another idea.

* merged *

[Opus4]

See the property I posted above & try that.

For general UI slowness, also make sure you are using a graphics theme that is closest in size to the screen resolution used for your menus.

- Andy

[sakker]

I deleted all of my thumbnails in each directory and let Sage make it's own. ~5k compared to mine ~50k-100k
However, it appears that on the HD extender it is either reloading the thumbnail every time the cursor moves, or maybe it is checking to see if the thumbnail has changed? On the mvp it runs through them fine, once the thumbnail is loaded, I guess it is cached and it doesn't appear to reload the thumbnail when you are scrolling through the videos. The HD extender seems to reload them constantly.

I don't know what the difference in the two would be, but something is definitely different in how they load thumbnails.

If I only had the HD extender I would say I just have too large of thumbnails and I need to shrink them, but obviously with it blazing fast speed on the mvp's and crawling on the HD extender something is amiss.

[cncb]

Did you ever get any resolution to this? I tried adding the (enable_hardware_scaling_cache) property but it didn't seem to have any effect. If I am browsing music artists, for example, it takes a full 3 seconds to page down and then 3 more seconds to page up again. Clearly the images should be already loaded since I am going back and forth between the same two pages but it takes a full 3 seconds each time. This really ruins the browsing experience.

I have already scaled down my cover art so that browsing on the PC is quick. They each are ~500x500 images and less than 50kB each. Do I have to scale them down even more for the HD extender??

[cncb]

Anyone have any ideas why music library browsing is so slow for me on the HD100?

[_Demo_]

The size you should consider for the thumbnails is the uncompressed one. A 500x500 images will take 1 megabyte (500x500x4). The HD extender currently has around 16 megs of memory dedicated to images so it will only have enough space to store 16 of those images before it needs to reload them. Using 250x250 images give it the ability to store 4 times more images before needing to reload them.

_Demo_

[cncb]

Originally Posted by _Demo_

The size you should consider for the thumbnails is the uncompressed one. A 500x500 images will take 1 megabyte (500x500x4). The HD extender currently has around 16 megs of memory dedicated to images so it will only have enough space to store 16 of those images before it needs to reload them. Using 250x250 images give it the ability to store 4 times more images before needing to reload them.

Thanks for this information but I guess something else is going on here. I have reduced all my cover art to 250x250 but there is no change in the responsiveness. On the main music screen (Artists) I have the default grid of 9 items. This should not cause any images to be reloaded when I page down and then page up again but I consistently have a 3 second delay each time.

This is a wired network but each time I Page Down/Up the network activity light on the HD100 flashes as if it is retrieving something. Note that the responsiveness is fine in the other media screens (photos, recordings, etc). I have tried the SageMC music section to compare and it is completely unusable (there is a significant delay when even navigating the menu to the left of the thumbnails). Is anyone else getting decent performance in the music library on the HD100?

[Opus4]

Did you set this property:
ui/enable_hardware_scaling_cache=true

You mentioned it above, but didn't use the full name of it, so I figured it should be checked. Also: where did you set that property?

On the other hand, if it is true & the thumbs are smaller now, maybe try setting it back to false. My thumbs are 200x200 and I see no slowdown in the music browser like you are describing.

- Andy

[cncb]

Originally Posted by Opus4

Did you set this property:
ui/enable_hardware_scaling_cache=true

You mentioned it above, but didn't use the full name of it, so I figured it should be checked. Also: where did you set that property?

I have tried it both with and without that property and get the same behavior (I put it in the .properties file for the HD100 in the "clients" subdirectory.

In SageMC it literally takes 4 seconds to move down one button on the menu to the left of the album thumbnails! Each time it seems to be doing a lot of reading from the network??

[Narflex]

Originally Posted by cncb

I have tried it both with and without that property and get the same behavior (I put it in the .properties file for the HD100 in the "clients" subdirectory.

In SageMC it literally takes 4 seconds to move down one button on the menu to the left of the album thumbnails! Each time it seems to be doing a lot of reading from the network??

That property setting needs to go in Sage.properties.

[cncb]

Originally Posted by Narflex

That property setting needs to go in Sage.properties.

This was it. Thanks!