huge performance improvement using gemstone on hd100's

[motoman666]

After much playing trying to tweak the settings in gemstone so my hd100's would not be so sluggish.... I went into the settings and chose default sagetv for the UI.. but I left gemstone as the .xml. what this did was revert the interface but retained all the gemstone menu enhancements like weather backgrounds, widgets, full screen epg.. etc.. the default ui is probably 3 times faster than gemstone, and with weather backgrounds and widgets, it is still a huge improvement on my underpowered hd100. Unfortunately, as soon as I rebooted the extender... it reverted back to the gemstone UI. Is any way to retain what I did so it will remember when it reboots?

[OferL]

What exactly do you mean changing to the default ui but leaving the gs xml?

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by OferL

What exactly do you mean changing to the default ui but leaving the gs xml?

I believe what he means is to select the default (standard) theme. Maybe the graphics are smaller and easier to render that is the only thing that could improve performance.

[jorton]

When you use the Gemstone.xml STV file, it is coded to make sure that a theme that has the word "Gemstone" in the name is loaded. So when there is a restart it will revert to the default Gemstone theme.

This was done on purpose as the Gemstone STV requires a lot of custom theme images that are not included in the "Standard" theme. Lots of the fanart related images etc...

The Standard theme has less images and by loading it instead you are loading less theme images into memory so you may find it faster.

We did a lot of work on the last version to shrink the Gemstone theme images to shrink the memory usage. They are about as small as they can be now.

[motoman666]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

I believe what he means is to select the default (standard) theme. Maybe the graphics are smaller and easier to render that is the only thing that could improve performance.

Exactly, and it is still an improvment over the default sagetv. but the performance is much better. too bad once you reboot the extender, it reverts back to gemstone ui, which is very sluggish on the hd100. by disableing the gemstone plugin, i was able to get the performance back on the extenders.

[rwc]

If it's a question of file size, could you just resize all the images in the gemstone STV?

I would guess that this would give you the speed up your are looking for...I haven't tried it, but it sounds like a good idea

[jorton]

We have resized them all to be as small as they can be and maintain the resolution necessary.

Part of the issue is that we load a lot more images than the standard theme for all the eye candy like poster highlights etc... The current Gemstone theme has about 280 images (currently about 8MB, but used to be about 27MB before the resizing). The standard has about 220 images (about 4MB).

The HD100 was never something that any of the the Diamond/Gemstone devs tested on. I think as a group we only had HD200 and HD300 units to test on but there was always discussion about trying to make it HD100 friendly. A lot of the options were added to make things like widgets optional so that the HD100 would work better. Things like background fanart on a HD100 will also probably cause things to slow down and should be turned off or alternatively the fanart images should be scaled in the fanart menu to cache at a lower size/quality to help speed things up.

I guess you could resize them even more but they are mostly at the res necessary to look good on a 1920x1080 display so you may have some "fuzzy" images as a result.

Not sure that helps

J