Topic: Disable Theater View Animation? (Read 4697 times)

aljordan · « **on:** March 03, 2007, 01:45:44 pm »

Is there a way to disable the animation in Theater View? My PC stays on 24/7 without problems, but in Theater View the CPU utilization goes up and the system will freeze, forcing a reboot. This didn't happen when I was trying MC-11, but is consistent with the latest release of MC-12. Theater View is the main reason why I want to purchase MC, but it seems kind of ridiculous to unnecessarily force additional power consumption when trying to keep a media PC as cool running and quiet as possible.

Thank you,
Alan

JimH · « **Reply #1 on:** March 03, 2007, 01:51:48 pm »

MC12's TheaterView uses 3D animation. If it isn't working, it's probably a problem with the graphics card driver. You could try updating it.

I'm sorry, but the animation can't be disabled.

jmmttu77 · « **Reply #2 on:** March 03, 2007, 02:05:34 pm »

I don't really like the 3D animation either. Power consumption = Bad. And its not like the animation is breathtakingly beautiful either. Is the purpose for the animation to prevent screen burn in? MCE simply lets the screen saver take over at just the right time, i.e. if you are watching tv or visualizations it does not kick in, but when at the home page it does kick in.

raym · « **Reply #3 on:** March 03, 2007, 04:17:04 pm »

Quote from: aljordan on March 03, 2007, 01:45:44 pm

Is there a way to disable the animation in Theater View? My PC stays on 24/7 without problems, but in Theater View the CPU utilization goes up and the system will freeze, forcing a reboot. This didn't happen when I was trying MC-11, but is consistent with the latest release of MC-12. Theater View is the main reason why I want to purchase MC, but it seems kind of ridiculous to unnecessarily force additional power consumption when trying to keep a media PC as cool running and quiet as possible.

Setup Windows' power management (hibernate, standby, screensaver, whatever) to kick in after say 20 minutes. When you're watching something or doing anything in Display View, Theater View is obviously not in "focus" and therefore uses no CPU at all. When you're done playing something and you're back in Theater View, Windows' power management will kick in automatically. This is what I do and it works fine..

Quote from: jmmttu77 on March 03, 2007, 02:05:34 pm

MCE simply lets the screen saver take over at just the right time, i.e. if you are watching tv or visualizations it does not kick in, but when at the home page it does kick in.

As above, MC does exactly the same thing.

And no, I doubt MC's animations has anything to do with preventing "burn in".

benn600 · « **Reply #4 on:** March 03, 2007, 04:41:16 pm »

Can a new skin be created that doesn't include the 3d animation? I am also not a fan of it. Theater view should be very fast and the animation makes it much slower on my older computers.

jmmttu77 · « **Reply #5 on:** March 03, 2007, 05:41:46 pm »

Quote from: raym on March 03, 2007, 04:17:04 pm

And no, I doubt MC's animations has anything to do with preventing "burn in".

If that is the case, I wonder what the purpose is.....

benn600 · « **Reply #6 on:** March 03, 2007, 07:22:41 pm »

appearance!

isn't that what it's about now! Vista is all about the look. OSX brags about its cool appearance.

We have so many features now that one of the big remaining failures in software today is appearance and UI. It's just gotta look good.

jmmttu77 · « **Reply #7 on:** March 03, 2007, 08:28:34 pm »

Haha, I guess. But after all that extra power consumption it is taking to make her pretty, she still ain't the prettiest girl at the dance.

Griff · « **Reply #8 on:** March 03, 2007, 08:51:12 pm »

Yes she is, She is the best!

But, I guess you havent check out the Dance Opt. in Theater View.

Or Saving PN as a playlist!

Well if you dont like 3D,

Oh well

benn600 · « **Reply #9 on:** March 03, 2007, 09:52:03 pm »

MC owns the dance. You can't have a good dance without a DJ and MC is just that...extra power consumption? lol. From most of what I've known, processors are, generally speaking, always utilizing close to their maximum power consumption. The Pentium M was so revolutionary because it could shut down (or slow down) to not use so much power.

I'm guessing your graphics card is similar. On a recent episode of DL.TV, Patrick said it was best to put a low-end graphics card in a computer if it would only be used for a NAS to save power. High end graphics cards take lots of power even when they aren't being pushed to their limits.

aljordan · « **Reply #10 on:** March 04, 2007, 06:33:14 am »

Quote from: JimH on March 03, 2007, 01:51:48 pm

MC12's TheaterView uses 3D animation. If it isn't working, it's probably a problem with the graphics card driver. You could try updating it.

I have the latest drivers for my NVidia card, and TheaterView animation works, it is just that it uses CPU power and freezes te system. The problem is that I need TheaterView to select what songs to play from across the room. Yesterday I had Media Center playing songs from the standard view all day long. I switched to theater view at night and the PC froze within 15 minutes.

aljordan · « **Reply #11 on:** March 04, 2007, 06:39:57 am »

Quote from: raym on March 03, 2007, 04:17:04 pm

Setup Windows' power management (hibernate, standby, screensaver, whatever) to kick in after say 20 minutes. When you're watching something or doing anything in Display View, Theater View is obviously not in "focus" and therefore uses no CPU at all. When you're done playing something and you're back in Theater View, Windows' power management will kick in automatically. This is what I do and it works fine..

I use Theater View so I can pick out music to play from across the room. I would like to leave MC in TheaterView while the music is playing. Even when power management is set to shut off the monitor, TheaterView is still running. However, I guess I could just switch into theater view when picking out music and then switch back out quickly to avoid the freeze. Still, its kind of silly to not be able to disable the animations.

aljordan · « **Reply #12 on:** March 04, 2007, 06:51:06 am »

Quote from: benn600 on March 03, 2007, 09:52:03 pm

MC owns the dance. You can't have a good dance without a DJ and MC is just that...extra power consumption? lol. From most of what I've known, processors are, generally speaking, always utilizing close to their maximum power consumption. The Pentium M was so revolutionary because it could shut down (or slow down) to not use so much power.

I use a program called CrystalCPUID that will lower the voltage and the multipliers of my AMD Athlon 64 automatically when processor power is not needed. It allows the system to draw less power and also keeps the system quite a bit cooler as well as more quiet because the internal fans don't need to run as fast when not under load. Playing music, even with a software based crossover and parametric equalizer does not draw enough CPU power to cause the CPU to come out of its lowest power setting, but the theater view animation causes it to jump up to medium power draw. I don't want to buy a higher end graphics card because it just draws more power and generated more heat which would necessitate another fan.

JimH · « **Reply #13 on:** March 04, 2007, 07:23:24 am »

Latest doesn't always mean best with drivers or any software.

Try a google search on similar problems or a search on this forum at AVSForum. They have a lot of information about drivers, but you'll have to dig a little or ask someone to point you in the right direction.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=26

gappie · « **Reply #14 on:** March 04, 2007, 09:19:16 am »

it is possible to take away a part of the animations. that is: everything that is in the small cube and the cube. make a copy from your favorite theaterview in C:\Program Files\J River\Media Center 12\FullSkins and open the xml file from that copy with notepad. delete the whole part from <PICTURE> to </PICTURE> including those two words. and save.

an other thing is that the little screen that shows what is plying now can also be easely removed. remove:
<PIP Rect="1.2,76.5,22.2,97.5" PlayingNowRect="0.9,51.0,99.5,99.5" />
and save.

make sure that in options tv opens with the new saved version.

dont know if it helps for the cpu use. i dont have problems with it.

benn600 · « **Reply #15 on:** March 04, 2007, 09:50:00 am »

lol. This is funny. Theater view has no apparent affect on my system. The CPU usage for MC is 2% or less while playing FLAC and in theater view. My total CPU usage was around 20%...it's the same when theater view isn't open. So, with no difference in CPU usage, that's a good thing! It's hitting 2% now without theater view open.

Apparently you're computer just. Well, hmm.

jmmttu77 · « **Reply #16 on:** March 04, 2007, 09:56:41 am »

Quote from: benn600 on March 03, 2007, 04:41:16 pm

Can a new skin be created that doesn't include the 3d animation? I am also not a fan of it. Theater view should be very fast and the animation makes it much slower on my older computers.

So after your research, this no longer applies?

gallimore · « **Reply #17 on:** March 06, 2007, 03:15:59 pm »

I have to add to the call to disable the animation; it absolutely kills my laptop at HD resolutions.

Here's the details, Dell Inspiron 9400, 1.83GHz Core Duo, 2Gb Ram, ATI X1400. At 800x600 on the TV output, just sitting at the Theater home menu not playing any media uses ~8% of the CPUs, at 1024x600 on the TV output it is 11%. This scales with increasing resolution so that at 1920x1200 on the laptop's LCD panel it is at >50% of _both_ CPUs!

Well is that actually a problem? Well yes if you are using a USB low latency ASIO audio device, above 1024x768 the USB audio starves and playback is unusable. I have the ASIO audio buffer size as big as it will go (~19ms) in the audio drivers so I am stuffed.

I have a suspicion the problem is actually a memory bus latency problem; possibly the ATI hypermemory system locking use of main system memory when filling very large triangles, thus preventing USB and CPUs from getting use of the memory bus in a timely manner. I wonder if the problem would be mitigated by splitting the anmiation image up into a mesh of smaller triangles, although given that many of the audio visualisations also cause regular audio glitches fullscreen at 1920x1200, I suspect it still wouldn't be enough to make audio playback usable in Theater mode on a HDTV.

Overall I would be much happier if you could just get rid of the animation completely. As would I suspect anyone putting together a cheap, fanless, HD media centre box to go under the TV, using chipset integrated graphics without dedicated video RAM. That should be a perfectly feasible and reasonable thing to want to do.

Regards,
-stephen

gappie · « **Reply #18 on:** March 07, 2007, 12:00:16 pm »

besides power, i must say that i like theater view without the big moving logo much more. here is the noire version without it.

here is the link: http://www.gappie.nl/fotos/noiretv.JPG

prod · « **Reply #19 on:** March 07, 2007, 12:19:15 pm »

Very nice I'm sure, but I don't like it.

gappie · « **Reply #20 on:** March 07, 2007, 12:55:41 pm »

Quote from: prod on March 07, 2007, 12:19:15 pm

Very nice I'm sure, but I don't like it.

i agree that with noire it is not really an improvement, just made this to show what is possible. and i very much like it on my own tv skin.

raym · « **Reply #21 on:** March 07, 2007, 05:29:45 pm »

I may be in the minority but I like the background viz in Theater View. It's one of those things which makes MC visually different from all the other htpc front-ends out there. I don't think the default Noire skin does it justice though. It's just a bit too plain for my taste but running in the background of my own skin(s) looks cool.

I was the first to complain about the high CPU usage issues when this was first introduced but some improvements were made quite some time ago and since then, my CPU literally sits at 0% with Theater View just sitting there doing nothing. This will no doubt come down to the type of hardware being used.

If it were possible (I believe it is not) to configure the animations on or off, this would be great. I can understand the need for this on slower hardware but I would HATE to see this removed completely.

Thanks.

gappie · « **Reply #22 on:** March 07, 2007, 05:49:45 pm »

i agree it should not be removed. i like the cubes altough i could live without. my point is that it is already possible to change those files. just changed the empty background from my example above with the cow from the cubus. http://www.gappie.nl/fotos/noiretv2.JPG

when setting up your own tview it is easy to save what is in the cubus, and i changed them all to what i like, but the logo will be overwritten. gues, putting it on its own spot in each view would at least give people the oppertunity to do something with it.

raym · « **Reply #23 on:** March 07, 2007, 06:04:13 pm »

Are you saying you worked out how to remove the background viz? If so, how?

EDIT: oops, ok, I see what you mean now...

Quote

when setting up your own tview it is easy to save what is in the cubus, and i changed them all to what i like, but the logo will be overwritten.

jmmttu77 · « **Reply #24 on:** March 07, 2007, 09:20:48 pm »

Quote from: gappie on March 07, 2007, 12:00:16 pm

besides power, i must say that i like theater view without the big moving logo much more. here is the noire version without it.

I like that, Gappie. That is what I want...the big moving logo gone as well as the cube. The movement of both bothers me for some reason. So how do I, the novice, do such a thing? Thanks!

gappie · « **Reply #25 on:** March 08, 2007, 02:16:51 am »

to take away th cube:

go to: C:\Program Files\J River\Media Center 12\FullSkins and make a copy from your favorite theaterview in that folder and rename it.
open the xml file from that new folder with notepad. delete the whole part from <PICTURE> to </PICTURE> including those two words. and save.

now go to C:\Program Files\J River\Media Center 12\Data\Default Art. there is a file there that is called logo. open it with an image editor that can make the picture transparant, like ultimate paint (free). save. and you are ready.

make sure that in options tv opens with the new saved version.

remember that everytime you intall a new version of mc, the logo will be overwritten by the default one.

hope this was easy to folow.

NickM · « **Reply #26 on:** March 08, 2007, 08:48:03 pm »

Is it not easier just to delete logo.png?

gappie · « **Reply #27 on:** March 09, 2007, 02:55:57 am »

Quote from: NickM on March 08, 2007, 08:48:03 pm

Is it not easier just to delete logo.png?

maybe it is, i dont know if it is used on more places.

benn600 · « **Reply #28 on:** March 09, 2007, 11:29:22 pm »

Since when could guests post?

INTERACT FORUM

Author Topic: Disable Theater View Animation? (Read 4697 times)

gappie

gallimore

gappie

gappie

gappie

gappie

gappie