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[blgentry]

I've been working a bunch with Theater View on Mac recently.  I noticed that my fans turn on while I'm browsing in Theater View.  I opened the Activity Monitor and saw that CPU utilization is at roughly 300% for the Media Center 22 process.  This means it's full utilizing 3 cores of my processor.  It's clearly enough to tax the system and turn the fans on.  This is a 4.0 GHz quad core i7.  I'd think that would be enough power to run Theater View in a normal way.  It's very snappy and responsive in Theater View; very nice to use.  It's just that it's consuming so much CPU time.

My JMark on this machine is:  JRMark (version 22.0.102): 4431

When I eventually move this Theater system to a Mac mini, I don't think I'll have as much CPU power as this machine I'm testing on.  I'm unsure what will happen if MC "needs" this much CPU power in Theater View on a lesser powered machine.

Edited to add:

When playing a full bandwidth H.264 1080p video (bluray rip), MC's CPU utilization is between 45 and 55%.  Just as a data point.

Thanks for reading.

Brian.

[Hendrik]

What graphics card do you have in that machine?
Only thing i have access to is a Mac Book with intel graphics, and I don't really recall seeing that behavior there, but I'll double check.

[blgentry]

This machine I'm working with has:

AMD Radeon R9 M295X

Brian.

[Hendrik]

A 2014 27" iMac?

[blgentry]

Hendrick,

You are correct!  That's my current desktop system.  I'm experimenting with Theater View there to see if it's feasible to use a Mac as an MC based HTPC.  If so, I'll be buying some form of Mac Mini to use for that purpose.

I suppose that also means that I need to be sure that the GPU in whatever Mac mini I buy works correctly with MC for Mac.  Hmm.  I'm extremely reluctant to run Windows on anything, but maybe, just maybe I'll end up running Windows 7 on a compact form factor PC as an HTPC.  But I'd really rather do it all on a Mac if I can.

Thanks,

Brian.

[Hendrik]

I did some improvements that seemed to reduce the CPU usage quite a bit here, but its still a bit higher then I thought it should be, but maybe thats my MacBook just being slow. We'll see how it works out in the next build.

[blgentry]

Looking forward to the next build!  I'll be testing it as soon as it's availabe.

Thanks Hendrik. 

Brian.

[Magic_Randy]

FYI...

I'm running at ~80% CPU utilization when using Theater View on a MacBook Pro. I too will check again with the next release.