[mythtv] Apparent Speed Issues

[Isaac Richards]

On Sunday 03 August 2003 10:50 am, Michael J. Pedersen wrote:
> Using mythtv 0.10 seems to have had things slow down noticeably in terms
> of controls.
>
> As an example, I've noticed that when playing back a recording, I can
> hit pause, and it will take about a second from the time I hit pause to
> actually pause. The same is true in a number of other areas, too. I
> switch to the recordings screen, and this takes a couple of seconds to
> load. This is definitely not optimal, as I've got (at any one time) less
> than 50 recordings for it to process.

Turn on 'Aggressive sound buffering' to fix the pause issue -- some soundcards 
have very large internal buffers which can take up to a second or so to empty 
on pause.  If 'aggressive sound buffering' works for you (it doesn't work on 
everyone's machine), it'll make mythtv treat that big buffer as something 
quite a bit smaller..

As for the UI being slow, it's most likely the time needed to resize all the 
images for display.  If you're running at 800x600, it doesn't need to resize 
on the fly, and so is quite a bit faster.  I've (mostly) fixed this in CVS, 
by creating an image cache for it to store pre-scaled theme images in.  

If you're _still_ having slowness, there's a couple other things you can do, 
such as turning off some of the transparency ("Use Transparent Boxes" in 
Setup/Appearance), switch the background shading method to 'Fill' ("Popup 
Background Shading Method" in the same place), and changing the way it draws 
the program guide ("Guide Shading Method" in Setup/TV Settings/Program Guide) 
to something like Colorized (shaded), instead of alpha blending.  If you have 
an nvidia display card, make sure to enable Render accelleration in your X 
config, as that speeds up pretty much all the UI behavior (hardware accel's 
font blending and image blending).

Isaac