[mythtv-users] Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine

[Jonathan Rogers]

James Fidell wrote:
> Todd wrote:
>
>   
>> The problem I'm having is with performance of this brand new machine
>> (both before and after the rebuild).  Despite this being the newest
>> and most powerful box in the house, the mythtv menus just seem to
>> DRAAAAAAAAG.  Responsiveness is quite frustrating I'm afraid.  I'm
>> navigating via keyboard as I haven't sussed out the remote control
>> bits just yet.
>>
>> Hardware: AMD A64 3500+  socket AM2  Athlon 64 512kb cache 
>>           Asus M2N-E motherboard, 1G RAM, 320G SATA HD, xfs for my
>>           recordings partition
>> Video card: cheapie PCI (gads) nVidia GeForce FX5200 based Conquerer
>>         FX5100Plus video card feeding a 19" CRT monitor. 
>>     
>
> Second time I've asked this question today :)
>
> Are you using the stock nv video drivers, or the Nvidia closed-source
> ones?  I see a massive improvement in responsiveness with the Nvidia
> ones presumably because rendering is much faster.
>   
I have a similar problem, though I don't know if it's related. I have a
Radeon 9600 in my Athlon64 X2 3800+ machine and am using X.org's radeon
driver. The video playback performs fine for both SD and HD, but menu
drawing is very slow after exiting from video playback. While I can
scroll through the recording list pretty quickly just after mythfrontend
starts up, as soon as I've played video, it takes a second or more to
move one menu item. Certain menu areas, such as system information, can
reset this behavior, switching it back to quicker scrolling until I play
video again.

On the same machine, using an Nvidia card with either the nv or nvidia
driver results in much snappier menu navigation, though video playback
is usually no better and sometimes worse. Ironically, I have a different
MythTV system with a Via C3 CPU and PVR-350 for all video output and it
has much snappier menus than my Athlon64 machine, though both the
overall system performance and general video drawing performance are far
inferior.

Because the slow menu drawing seems to be unrelated to true video
hardware and driver performance and it changes with mythfrontend state,
I'm convinced it has to be a bug in MythTV or perhaps a bizarre
interaction between MythTV and X.org. It is very mysterious to me why it
would only show up with certain X.org video drivers.

Jonathan Rogers