[mythtv-users] slow startup, channel change

[Robert Johnston]

On 1/4/06, Matt Price <matt.price at utoronto.ca> wrote:
> I've got mythtv running and am loving it.  My main complaint is that,
> on my pentium-III system, it is veyr slow to start up; "prescaling
> images" takes a long time, after which there's a long (1 minute?)
> pause until the menu comes up.  switching betweem menu items can be
> slow too.
>
> I know this is a slow system, but I have a hauppauge pvr-350
> installed, so most of the heavy lifting should be taken care of.  Are
> there any tweaks I can apply to speed up the funcitoning of the gui?

The "Prescaling Images" IS what's done to speed up the GUI. If we
didn't do that (And it's cached for following runs, so it shouldn't
take near so long the second time) then we'd have to re-scale the
images every time you change screen.

As the besic premise is that the Myth box is kept running 24/7, you
should only have to see the "Prescaling Images" prompt once in a blue
moon.

I believe the latest versions of the IVTV driver are a lot faster at
drawing onto the 350's Framebuffer, but as that's a PCI transfer,
it'll be slower.

Another suggestion would be to make sure that the 350 is in the
highest PCI slot you can, not a shared PCI/ISA slot, as that will
enable the card to use "BusMastering", which will speed things up
some. Also make sure you have enabled DMA transfers on your hard-drive
with HDParm (If they're supported on your motherboard).

Unfortunately, as it's only a PIII system you have, manipulating
fullscreen graphics will be slow. The only thing I could recommend is
to perhaps change the "rendering method", or build yourself a Theme
that has only basic colours in (No fancy images to scale and resize =
performance boost). That's about it, though. Sorry.
--
Robert "Anaerin" Johnston