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[robydago]

I've got
* Media Center 12.0.259
* Microsoft Windows XP  Service Pack 2
* Intel Pentium 4 2598 MHz MMX
* Memory: Total - 1571 MB
* Video card: nVidia GeForce AGP FX 5200 (driver 6.14.10.9371)

And the Theater View UI is painfully slow.... and has always been with all versions of MC12 on the same system.

What's the problem? My video card? If so, is it only due to all background animations going on while using the Theater View UI? If it's only due to that, an option to turn off all background animations would be great...

[JimH]

* Video card: nVidia GeForce AGP FX 5200 (driver 6.14.10.9371)

And the Theater View UI is painfully slow.... and has always been with all versions of MC12 on the same system.

Try updating your video driver.  If that doesn't work, in MC Options for Theater View, try reducing the frame rate. 

[robydago]

JimH,
- video driver is the latest available
- reducing frame rate doesn't change anything

[glynor]

What's the problem? My video card? If so, is it only due to all background animations going on while using the Theater View UI? If it's only due to that, an option to turn off all background animations would be great...

It's probably not due to the background animations, but you can disable them on either a global or skin-by-skin basis.

To disable it in a particular Theater View skin, simply add the following code to the skin's main.xml (Theater View skins are located at C:\Program Files\J River\Media Center 12\FullSkins):

Code: [Select]

<ANIMATION>
   <Background Bitmap="Animation\Background.png" Alpha="100" Mode="0" />
</ANIMATION>
To disable it globally, add the same code to this file: C:\Program Files\J River\Media Center 12\FullSkins\Shared\Base 1.XML

As I said though... You'll likely find that this is only of limited benefit.  On my systems, it does feel a tiny bit more responsive with the animation disabled, but on the order of 2-5 FPS is really the only difference.  The animation is fairly simplistic, really....

PS. Thanks to jmone for figuring this out!

[Matt]

Disabling animation shouldn't make any frame rate difference.  Getting a texture to the card takes time, but once it's there moving it around is just matrix math.

However, if you're out of video memory so textures are getting paged back and forth, it'll kill you.  You could try overwriting the background image with a 1x1 image to see if it makes any difference.

[Mr ChriZ]

I've got
* Media Center 12.0.259
* Microsoft Windows XP  Service Pack 2
* Intel Pentium 4 2598 MHz MMX
* Memory: Total - 1571 MB
* Video card: nVidia GeForce AGP FX 5200 (driver 6.14.10.9371)

And the Theater View UI is painfully slow.... and has always been with all versions of MC12 on the same system.

What's the problem? My video card? If so, is it only due to all background animations going on while using the Theater View UI? If it's only due to that, an option to turn off all background animations would be great...

Not much help here, but I thought I'd mention.
My sister has a AMD Athlon XP 1800, with an ATI Radeon 256mb 5200 (something like that anyway..)
since the vertical sync update that came a few builds ago, her system runs theater view really smoothly.

[glynor]

Disabling animation shouldn't make any frame rate difference.

With the frame rate display you provide inside MC, it's nearly impossible to tell.  I tested with FRAPS and I did see a 2-5 FPS (average) difference with the animations on vs. off with my ATI X800XT 512MB card.  That's pretty close to the margin of error, but was fairly consistent over multiple tests.  I also saw consistent lower Minimum FPS scores with the animation enabled (these were even closer margins only 2-3 FPS different).

Of course, 2-5 FPS is all but impossible to see at all but the lowest frame rates.... However, a much more useful FPS display than the one provided would be one that lists Average Framerates and Min/Max after Theater View is exited (perhaps just written to the log).  This would allow us to really test it and see FOR REAL (since FRAPS is certainly not always completely accurate) what the effect of this and other future changes make on performance.

[Matt]

If it helps, you can tap the "Pause / Break" button in Theater View to see the frame rate and time spent inside each draw loop.

Since we cap the framerate, the msd (milliseconds per draw) will be more meaningful.

[robydago]

I disabled the animation but it's still too slow. It's not really an issue on this system, because I don't need Theater View, but I'm wondering what to expect when I'll build my HTPC; I want to have a very low end system for two reasons:
- less money
- less noise, 'cause more power = more heat = more cooling devices = more moving parts = more noise.... and you don't want that in an HTPC