Mailing List Archive

Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine
Greetings,

Long time Linux user, but I'm relatively new to mythtv having used it
for a little over 2 months. I built my first box 2 months ago, and
just re-built it with a new hard drive a few days ago so I've been
through the process twice now.

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.
Capture: Old cheap analog Norwood Micro S800 TV tuner using tips at
http://www.mythtvtalk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5571 got it working.
It's being fed analog cable via co-ax, no HD involved.
Software: Ubuntu Feisty base, then followed these, except using schedules direct:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MythTV_Feisty

The box is doing nothing but Myth and Ubuntu and sits in my living
room. The myth menus are what I'd say is extremely slow when it's
recording something (20 seconds for some operations), and quite slow
when it's not (e.g. hit an arrow key in the media library menuand wait
3-8 seconds for a response).

Any advice as to what to check, what to tweak, or whether the myth
interface is just rather slow would be helpful! The box seems
responsive otherwise --just myth seems really slow, and I can't figure
out why.

Thanks for any assistance!

Todd
_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users@mythtv.org
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
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.

James
_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users@mythtv.org
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
James Fidell <james@fidell.co.uk> writes:

> 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.

Hi James, thanks for your response.

The honest answer is: I dunno. So I suppose that implies the stock
ones installed with Ubuntu?

I've never had to install a video driver in Linux before (even back in
RedHat 4.0). Any pointer to where I can learn more about the good
drivers sounds like it would help my situation a great deal.

Thanks again!

_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users@mythtv.org
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
Todd wrote:
> James Fidell <james@fidell.co.uk> writes:
>
>> 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.
>
> Hi James, thanks for your response.
>
> The honest answer is: I dunno. So I suppose that implies the stock
> ones installed with Ubuntu?
>
> I've never had to install a video driver in Linux before (even back in
> RedHat 4.0). Any pointer to where I can learn more about the good
> drivers sounds like it would help my situation a great deal.

No idea what Ubuntu installs by default, I'm afraid. The latest nvidia
drivers are available from their website though and installation is
really pretty straightforward. You may need to tweak a few options in
xorg.conf to get it to perform the way you want but unless you're trying
to get XvMC working, it's fairly painless.

James
_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users@mythtv.org
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
Ubuntu doesn't install Nvidia's accelerated drivers by default as
they're closed source. It's better to follow these directions
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia
to install them the Ubuntu way than to download the drivers straight
off Nvidia's site as it can lead to things getting a bit messed up on
future upgrades.


Alex
_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users@mythtv.org
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
"Alex Halovanic" <halovanic@gmail.com> writes:

> Ubuntu doesn't install Nvidia's accelerated drivers by default as
> they're closed source. It's better to follow these directions
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia
> to install them the Ubuntu way than to download the drivers straight
> off Nvidia's site as it can lead to things getting a bit messed up on
> future upgrades.

Y'all rock. Thanks much for the pointers. I'll report back how it
improves things.

_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users@mythtv.org
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
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
_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users@mythtv.org
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
The problem has to be related to the disks. If I can watch SD on my
x-box front-end, your box is grotesquely overpowered wrt CPU and
memory.

Run vmstat 1 and iostat 1 while the problem is happening and look for
high swap in and out, and/or high disk activity on the disk with your
database.
--
Tony Lill, Tony.Lill@AJLC.Waterloo.ON.CA
President, A. J. Lill Consultants fax/data (519) 650 3571
539 Grand Valley Dr., Cambridge, Ont. N3H 2S2 (519) 241 2461
--------------- http://www.ajlc.waterloo.on.ca/ ----------------

Understatement of the century:
"Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating
system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for
386(486) AT clones"

- Linus Torvalds, August 1991

_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users@mythtv.org
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
James Fidell <james@fidell.co.uk> writes:
>
> No idea what Ubuntu installs by default, I'm afraid. The latest nvidia
> drivers are available from their website though and installation is
> really pretty straightforward. You may need to tweak a few options in
> xorg.conf to get it to perform the way you want but unless you're trying
> to get XvMC working, it's fairly painless.

Major kudos to James here. I went to NVidia's site tonight and
grabbed the geforce fx 5200 drivers, killed gdm with sudo
/etc/init.d/gdm stop to get to a shell prompt with X dead,
apt-get install libc6-dev to get teh headers the nvidia shell script
needed for recompiling some kernel goodies, and it worked fine.

Of course, I had forgotten Alex's very helpful post to do it a more
Ubuntu friendly way while I was down in the basement with the myth
box.

At any rate, OMFG what a difference these accellerated drivers made.
I could not believe it. The "prescaling images" stuff when starting
the front end which used to take about 10 seconds or so dropped to
under a second, and the menus are zippy zippy zippy. How did I live
without these drivers?

Thanks James and Alex. Now I've gotta figure out how to undo whatever
all nvidia's shell script might've done and revisit it a more upgrade
friendly ubuntu way. But as a reformed masochist^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
gentoo user, I'm used to constantly fixing broken stuff at that level.

Thanks again -- my god what a difference the accelerated nvidia
drivers made in MythTV usability.



_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users@mythtv.org
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
On 30 Sep 2007 01:47:27 -0500, Todd <mythtv@vbref.org> wrote:
>
> James Fidell <james@fidell.co.uk> writes:
> >
> > No idea what Ubuntu installs by default, I'm afraid. The latest nvidia
> > drivers are available from their website though and installation is
> > really pretty straightforward. You may need to tweak a few options in
> > xorg.conf to get it to perform the way you want but unless you're trying
> > to get XvMC working, it's fairly painless.
>
> Major kudos to James here. I went to NVidia's site tonight and
> grabbed the geforce fx 5200 drivers, killed gdm with sudo
> /etc/init.d/gdm stop to get to a shell prompt with X dead,
> apt-get install libc6-dev to get teh headers the nvidia shell script
> needed for recompiling some kernel goodies, and it worked fine.
>
> Of course, I had forgotten Alex's very helpful post to do it a more
> Ubuntu friendly way while I was down in the basement with the myth
> box.
>
> At any rate, OMFG what a difference these accellerated drivers made.
> I could not believe it. The "prescaling images" stuff when starting
> the front end which used to take about 10 seconds or so dropped to
> under a second, and the menus are zippy zippy zippy. How did I live
> without these drivers?
>
> Thanks James and Alex. Now I've gotta figure out how to undo whatever
> all nvidia's shell script might've done and revisit it a more upgrade
> friendly ubuntu way. But as a reformed masochist^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
> gentoo user, I'm used to constantly fixing broken stuff at that level.
>
> Thanks again -- my god what a difference the accelerated nvidia
> drivers made in MythTV usability.


Now turn on OpenGL UI and it's gonna be even better!
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Tony Lill wrote:
> The problem has to be related to the disks. If I can watch SD on my
> x-box front-end, your box is grotesquely overpowered wrt CPU and
> memory.

Are you responding to my message? If so, I can tell you that I'm 100%
certain my slow UI problem is unrelated to disk performance. It has
nothing to do with what is or isn't going on with the disks. In
particular, it's usually when there's no significant disk activity
because nothing's being recorded or commflagged or anything. IO
starvation problems would greatly affect playback performance, which is
not what I'm seeing. I can watch HD shows while one or two commflag
processes are working in the background.

What varies is whether I have just ended playback or not. Before
playback, menu navigation is pretty snappy, but afterward, there's a
constant delay of more than a second moving from one program to the next.

Jonathan Rogers
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFHAAzSMs6f82yVS5wRAsD+AKDKHj90h9ynDrxpd9bXUFLOXY+fFgCgxsbP
Owwz2I4q2IL+Ene5LSoBimc=
=VA/b
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users@mythtv.org
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
Jonathan Rogers <jonner@teegra.net> writes:

> Tony Lill wrote:
> > The problem has to be related to the disks. If I can watch SD on my
> > x-box front-end, your box is grotesquely overpowered wrt CPU and
> > memory.
>
> Are you responding to my message? If so, I can tell you that I'm 100%
> certain my slow UI problem is unrelated to disk performance. It has
> nothing to do with what is or isn't going on with the disks. In
> particular, it's usually when there's no significant disk activity
> because nothing's being recorded or commflagged or anything. IO
> starvation problems would greatly affect playback performance, which is
> not what I'm seeing. I can watch HD shows while one or two commflag
> processes are working in the background.
>
> What varies is whether I have just ended playback or not. Before
> playback, menu navigation is pretty snappy, but afterward, there's a
> constant delay of more than a second moving from one program to the next.

Jonathan,

I missed your original post, but recently I was floored to see what a
difference switching video drivers. I have an nVidia based card that
was using whatever default ubuntu drivers ubuntu had selected, and
installing the nvidia drivers from the nvidia site made so much of a
difference, I still can't quite believe it.


Dunno if this helps any.

_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users@mythtv.org
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
Jonathan, have you tried switching to drawing the menus with QT in the
appearance menu? There might be something funky happening in the
interaction with playing video and using opengl on your card.




Alex
_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users@mythtv.org
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
I have this problem too. Not sure how 'fast' my machine is (athlon 64 3800,
single core) but the menus are definitely slow:

from choosing "Watch Recordings" to actually having the Watch Recordings
screen fully drawn - 3-4s
from program group to individual program list - 1-2s
scrolling up or down an item in the list - 1-2s
from choosing Delete to the Are you sure? dialog being fully displayed -
3-4s (I get the empty box after 2s then the words)

That's pretty consistent regardless of what I've been doing i.e. I don't
have Todd's problem where it's only slow after playback. It's also annoying
because the remote is more responsive than the UI, so for example I often
hit right to go from the program group to program list and end up in the
program menu for the first program in the list (i.e. right x2) because I'm
sub-consciously holding down the remote button until I see the screen
change.

My graphics card is an on-board NVidia 6150 LE. It wasn't my first choice,
when I bought the machine it had a more powerful ATI card which I could
never get fully working with the Linux drivers. I gave up, sold it on ebay
and switched to the onboard card. Which, using the 'nv' driver has been
fine. It'll play full-screen video at 1280x768 (which is the highest
resolution my TV with do) smoothly. Since I'm using it for SD (Freeview in
the UK) that's more than I need.

I've tried and failed to get the nividia driver to work properly. Inspired
by recent messages here I tried again this weekend, spent a total of about
10 hours on it, googling, searching the wiki, various forums, tried several
"this worked for me" solutions but I always have tearing when playing back
video. The menus sure are zippy and responsive though.

So to sum up - the choice for me is between fast menus and video tearing
with the nvidia driver, and sluggish menus and perfect video with nv - so
I'm back to the nv driver.

I find this extremely odd, that drawing a dialog box with text in it
requires hardware acceleration but playing video is fine. There's probably a
good reason why it's not that simple but that's the high-level view.

A further point - my laptop which I sometimes use as a frontend has a
GeForce Go 7600 and that works flawlessly with the nvidia driver. Zippy
menus and smooth video. Which got me wondering - if I bought a better
graphics card is there a chance it'll work, or might it be related to the
software and other hardware? I kind of resent spending money when my
current card is clearly capable of what I need, but then compared to hours
of my free time maybe it's worth it.

The other thing I might do is have a delve in the code. I'm not a C++
programmer but maybe I can figure something out. Maybe have some kind of
alternate simpler interface for the Watch Recordings screen. What do you
think?

--
Paul Mason
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
Paul,
You will have terrible performance with the free nv driver and the
menus if they're being drawn with the default OpenGL painter as it's
basically trying to emulate 3D hardware using only software. Have you
tried my suggestion of changing the 'Paint Engine' to QT in the
Setup->Appearance menu and restarting the frontend? That's generally
far snappier, since basically all the OpenGL does is allow for fading
effects in the menus.


Alex
_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users@mythtv.org
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
On 01/10/2007, Alex Halovanic <halovanic@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Paul,
> You will have terrible performance with the free nv driver and the
> menus if they're being drawn with the default OpenGL painter as it's
> basically trying to emulate 3D hardware using only software. Have you
> tried my suggestion of changing the 'Paint Engine' to QT in the
> Setup->Appearance menu and restarting the frontend? That's generally
> far snappier, since basically all the OpenGL does is allow for fading
> effects in the menus.



I've always been using QT.

--
Paul Mason
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
"Alex Halovanic" <halovanic@gmail.com> writes:

> Paul,
> You will have terrible performance with the free nv driver and the
> menus if they're being drawn with the default OpenGL painter as it's
> basically trying to emulate 3D hardware using only software. Have you
> tried my suggestion of changing the 'Paint Engine' to QT in the
> Setup->Appearance menu and restarting the frontend? That's generally
> far snappier, since basically all the OpenGL does is allow for fading
> effects in the menus.

I'll toss in my experience with the free nv driver with respect to
this setting. Even with Qt selected, performance was abyssmal, awful,
horrible and frustrating. Despite the AMD A64 3500+ with 1GB RAM.

Nvidia's own drivers though fixed it.


_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users@mythtv.org
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
On 01 Oct 2007 11:00:06 -0500, Todd <mythtv@vbref.org> wrote:
>
> "Alex Halovanic" <halovanic@gmail.com> writes:
>
> I'll toss in my experience with the free nv driver with respect to
> this setting. Even with Qt selected, performance was abyssmal, awful,
> horrible and frustrating. Despite the AMD A64 3500+ with 1GB RAM.
>
> Nvidia's own drivers though fixed it.



Yep. Fixed it for me too. Shame about the video playback.



--
Paul Mason
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
On Mon, 2007-10-01 at 15:45 +0100, Paul Mason wrote:
> t'll play full-screen video at 1280x768 (which is the highest
> resolution my TV with do) smoothly. Since I'm using it for SD
> (Freeview in the UK) that's more than I need.

I had my xorg.conf set for a resolution of 1920x1200 since that's the
native resolution of my panel. MythTV menus were pretty laggy (I don't
have a particularly great graphics card).

As you point out, this is complete overkill for SD/Freeview.

Whilst investigating other issues, I changed xorg.conf to 720x450 and my
menus now zip along.

(I'm not saying that particular resolution has significance - in my case
I'm still fiddling with supported resolutions/refresh rates for my panel
- but that Myth menus seem much quicker with lower resolutions. Which is
obvious in hindsight, but I hadn't come across it in any documentation.)

Regards,

kev.



_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users@mythtv.org
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
On Sep 30, 2007, at 1:53 PM, Jonathan Rogers wrote:
> What varies is whether I have just ended playback or not. Before
> playback, menu navigation is pretty snappy, but afterward, there's a
> constant delay of more than a second moving from one program to the
> next.

I wonder if this is a disk cache issue. After playback the disk
cache will have been completely filled with parts of the video you've
just watched, so it's going to have to fetch all the other stuff from
disk again.



_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users@mythtv.org
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
On 01/10/2007, Kevin Page <mythtv-users-list@krp.org.uk> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2007-10-01 at 15:45 +0100, Paul Mason wrote:
> > t'll play full-screen video at 1280x768 (which is the highest
> > resolution my TV with do) smoothly. Since I'm using it for SD
> > (Freeview in the UK) that's more than I need.
>
> I had my xorg.conf set for a resolution of 1920x1200 since that's the
> native resolution of my panel. MythTV menus were pretty laggy (I don't
> have a particularly great graphics card).
>
> As you point out, this is complete overkill for SD/Freeview.
>
> Whilst investigating other issues, I changed xorg.conf to 720x450 and my
> menus now zip along.
>
> (I'm not saying that particular resolution has significance - in my case
> I'm still fiddling with supported resolutions/refresh rates for my panel
> - but that Myth menus seem much quicker with lower resolutions. Which is
> obvious in hindsight, but I hadn't come across it in any documentation.)


Thanks for that. As a quick experiment I tried it with 800x600 and 640x480
both of which were significantly faster, but still not what I'd like.

I'm currently compiling mythtv with profiling support just to get a clearer
idea where it's spending its time.


--
Paul Mason
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
Alex Halovanic wrote:
> You will have terrible performance with the free nv driver and the
> menus if they're being drawn with the default OpenGL painter as it's
> basically trying to emulate 3D hardware using only software.

Confirmed, though the OpenGL setting only has a noticeable impact on the
upper level menus, where it fades in/out the selections in what appears
to be slow motion. Overall it makes the situation worse, but it doesn't
make the menus that were slow before any slower.

The problem is specifically with the show selection menus and similar
menus. Not the top-level menus or the recording group selection pop-up menu.


> Have you tried my suggestion of changing the 'Paint Engine' to QT in
> the Setup->Appearance menu and restarting the frontend?

As another person mention, I had always been using qt until I tried
OpenGL for the first time today.


I've been suffering from this slow menu problem for like 6 months, but
being on a combo BE/FE machine where the FE gets only occasional use for
video editing, I hadn't been adequately motivated to research it.
However, I had been surprised to see no mention of the problem on this
list until just now, and wondered if it was a problem specific to my system.

My symptoms were pretty much as the OP described, and I also noticed
that the problem would occasionally fix itself, but I never observed any
correlation with any specific action - just that if the FE was left
running for a long time (on the order of weeks) it would go away, and
after restarting the FE (not the computer) it'd be back. I also noticed
that this problem was introduced with some of the updates just prior to
the Ubuntu Fiesty release (Feburary timeframe).


As others have reported, switching to the proprietary NVIDIA drivers
fixed the problem. However, I did run into a glitch with the driver
switch. I happened to have left the FE in OpenGL mode when I upgraded
the driver, and when I tried running the FE again the prescaling screen
was normal, but then the main menu screen appeared just as a black
window (I run the FE windowed). Dragging the window caused a blue
background to flicker into view, but no menus.

I probably could have flipped some setting in the DB to fix this, but
Ubuntu makes the driver switch only a few clicks, so I reverted,
switched back to Qt, and went back to the proprietary driver, where it
worked fine.

Apparently the OpenGL implementation is broken in the proprietary driver
with my hardware, which is an integrated video chip in the NVIDIA
nForce2 chipset (lspci reports GeForce4 MX). Could be Ubuntu's
Restricted Device Manager chose the wrong driver. (The howto mentions a
legacy driver, but it installed the mainstream driver.)

-Tom
_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users@mythtv.org
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
On Oct 1, 2007, at 11:40 AM, Tom Metro wrote:
> Apparently the OpenGL implementation is broken in the proprietary
> driver
> with my hardware, which is an integrated video chip in the NVIDIA
> nForce2 chipset (lspci reports GeForce4 MX). Could be Ubuntu's
> Restricted Device Manager chose the wrong driver. (The howto
> mentions a
> legacy driver, but it installed the mainstream driver.)

GeForce 4 chipsets should use the legacy driver, according to
NVIDIA's site:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_32667.html

_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users@mythtv.org
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine [ In reply to ]
There have been several threads talking about this problem, including this
one:

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/255655?search_string=slow%20recording%20menu

I too have this problem on a FC7 AMD Athlon 2500+. I use the nvidia 9746
driver. I have never used nv or anything else. I was initially using qt
menu renderer but switched to OpenGL and that actually seemed to help a
little. Not sure why since it seems to be the opposite of what most people
expect. I also turned on "CPU friendly thumbnails" or something like that
in the setup menu. Maybe that helped a little too.

Bottom line is that this problem did not exist in my previous setup of Myth
0.18 and I think nvidia 7174 driver. It was apparently introduced somewhere
in 0.19, based on threads in the discussion archive. Still happening in
0.20...

Larry

On 10/1/07, Tom Metro <tmetro+mythtv-users@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Alex Halovanic wrote:
> > You will have terrible performance with the free nv driver and the
> > menus if they're being drawn with the default OpenGL painter as it's
> > basically trying to emulate 3D hardware using only software.
>
> Confirmed, though the OpenGL setting only has a noticeable impact on the
> upper level menus, where it fades in/out the selections in what appears
> to be slow motion. Overall it makes the situation worse, but it doesn't
> make the menus that were slow before any slower.
>
> The problem is specifically with the show selection menus and similar
> menus. Not the top-level menus or the recording group selection pop-up
> menu.
>
>
> > Have you tried my suggestion of changing the 'Paint Engine' to QT in
> > the Setup->Appearance menu and restarting the frontend?
>
> As another person mention, I had always been using qt until I tried
> OpenGL for the first time today.
>
>
> I've been suffering from this slow menu problem for like 6 months, but
> being on a combo BE/FE machine where the FE gets only occasional use for
> video editing, I hadn't been adequately motivated to research it.
> However, I had been surprised to see no mention of the problem on this
> list until just now, and wondered if it was a problem specific to my
> system.
>
> My symptoms were pretty much as the OP described, and I also noticed
> that the problem would occasionally fix itself, but I never observed any
> correlation with any specific action - just that if the FE was left
> running for a long time (on the order of weeks) it would go away, and
> after restarting the FE (not the computer) it'd be back. I also noticed
> that this problem was introduced with some of the updates just prior to
> the Ubuntu Fiesty release (Feburary timeframe).
>
>
> As others have reported, switching to the proprietary NVIDIA drivers
> fixed the problem. However, I did run into a glitch with the driver
> switch. I happened to have left the FE in OpenGL mode when I upgraded
> the driver, and when I tried running the FE again the prescaling screen
> was normal, but then the main menu screen appeared just as a black
> window (I run the FE windowed). Dragging the window caused a blue
> background to flicker into view, but no menus.
>
> I probably could have flipped some setting in the DB to fix this, but
> Ubuntu makes the driver switch only a few clicks, so I reverted,
> switched back to Qt, and went back to the proprietary driver, where it
> worked fine.
>
> Apparently the OpenGL implementation is broken in the proprietary driver
> with my hardware, which is an integrated video chip in the NVIDIA
> nForce2 chipset (lspci reports GeForce4 MX). Could be Ubuntu's
> Restricted Device Manager chose the wrong driver. (The howto mentions a
> legacy driver, but it installed the mainstream driver.)
>
> -Tom
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users@mythtv.org
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>