LinuxMCE Forums
General => Users => Topic started by: Crypt on December 09, 2007, 11:14:08 pm
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I have installed LinuxMCE DVD quick install n a P4 2.0 Ghz system, 512MB ram and a 128MB video card. During the install it seemed a little slow, but it worked. After the install it got up and running and was slow as hell. I went to the Kubuntu desktop and after shutting down LinuxMCE it worked great. I haven't been able to figure what could be causing this to be so slow, considering the computer has run a few other OS's and never had an issue. Anyone have an idea what may be causing this?
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What GPU do you have? Nvidia/ATI? Also what UI settings?
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It's the RAM, I have a PIV 1.7GHz and a PIV3GHz and the difference between 512 and 1024MB RAM or even 768MB is breathtaking, atleast that was my experience.
Now above 1GB (2.5GB in the 3GHz machine now) I hardly notice an improvement.
Also your graphics solution may make a difference. but I started out with an ATI Rage Fury 128 and it worked acceptable on UI1.
But, the machine you describe isn't excactly a 'powerhouse', I knew that and expected bad performance from my 1.7GHz, but it was better than I feared. Still...
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Nvidia FX 5200. I am not what UI settings your referring to, but if it si the opengl ones I used the lightest overlay...other then that everything is default. Also, I am aware this is not a powerhouse machine, but well from the system requirements I read, this machine should be more then powerful enough to do what I want. I am not streaming TV through it, I am not using it as a phone system, security, lighting... I am using it to watch backed up movies, listen to my MP3 collection...I figured with what I wanted to do with it, it should be more then capable. So far I have shut down LinuxMCE and have been using it as a desktop and it works great that way. I suppose I can see if I have more RAM around that I can stick into it and see if it makes any difference.
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That machine is more can cabable as a client, and will work 'adequatly' as a standalone hybrid.
But it also depends on what your expectations are and what you consider slow.
It's above the 'minimum specs', and it will work reliably for LMCE, but it will do so at it's own pace. And if that's ok with you you have a good enough machine for you. these things are highly objective :)
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It is a standalone system. I do not have any other LinuxMCE systems in the house and might look at doing that n the future when I live in a house and not an apartment. As for what I consider slow, well let me describe it for you. With LinuxMCE up and running, I click on say media. I have to wait for the box to appear around the media button and then wait again for it to move to the next screen. we are talking somewhere between 15 to 20 seconds per movement. The video is so choppy it is unwatchable. Even the video on install was so choppy it was useless. The one anime I had up and running was worse then trying to talk to someone with a severe stutter.
All it is going to be used for at the moment is strictly playback of media, be it anime, movies, music. I might in the future set it up as a PVR, but that might be some time. At the moment I don't see the need for it, actually at th moment i has a lot of features I probably won't be using. Though thats not to say I won't at some point in the future.
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I think for the time being you're probably better off using something a bit more light weight like mythbuntu or VDR for instance.
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very strange, it sounds like you are running the vesa driver by mistake.
can you go to the KDE desktop, open konsole, and type more /etc/X11/xorg.conf ??
if you look in the Device section for your graphics card in that file, there should be an entry similar to "nvidia" "intel" "i810" etc... if it says "vesa", then it needs to be changed to "nvidia"
-Thom
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That's not right, I have had much better performance than that from a PIII 500... (Also ATI Rage 128)
I think you should post a bit more details about your system as something is definitely up, I was talking about wait times of a few seconds for menus to display. This is not it.
It's standard definition content? no HD?
Try rerunning the AV-wizard (after the 'tones' at boot up hold the left shift until you hear another tone).
Select UI1 (the top one).
Pick a resolution you know to work, you could try 800x600 or 1024x768 (if you are on a computer monitor now?) and see if that helps, with SD content going higher than 800x600 isn't really much of a point, alltough 1024x768 looks better for other apps, like firefox.
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I am not sure what other system specs you require. As it stand, it is sitting on the KDE desktop and works great. No issues and it is running at 1024 X 768. As for the xorg.conf it is using nvidia and nvidia drivers. I am using U1 in the setup which is the lightest set for the screen. I have tried this with a computer monitor and my Sharp TV both using VGA and still have the same issues. As it stands with just using the KDE desktop watching movies and such work great. No issues what soever. I am not sure why starting LinuxMCE causes issues, but as i said I am going to try and add some more RAM to see if makes a difference. Let me know what I may be missing with my system set up and i'll answer the questions as much as I can.
As for using something else for now, why would I? I prefer the way that LinuxMCE looks and works and that I can add to it in the future if I want to. Maybe if I don't get this working I might look into something else, my biggest issue is that I am not one to give up that easily when I run into an issue.
Just to say again:
p4 2.0 GHz
512 MB RAM
128MB Nvidia FX 5200
onboard sound (not sure why it didn't pick up my soundblaster card, though i am working on it.)
3com NIC.
At the moment I have added all the network drives I need access to to fstab.
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onboard sound (not sure why it didn't pick up my soundblaster card, though i am working on it.)
Disable the onboard sound in the Bios and rerun the AV-wizard like I explained above.
As for more specs, I was asking about brand names and model numbers, like 'HP DX6100', or motherboard manufacturer, things like that.
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It's actually odd that the onboard sound is working since I turned it off in the BIOS yesterday. When I get home I will look more into what the system is and well I will take another look into the soundcard issue and see if Linux has installed both. I can change the default sound card if it does and that the BIOS still states the onboard sound is turned off.
As for the video, i have tried almost every one listed and still had the same bad issue as explained above.
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At the moment I have added all the network drives I need access to to fstab.
That should normally not be necessary.
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well i disabled the onboard sound, onboard nic and everything is working fine...well mostly everything. The system isn't picking up my shared media across my network. I am currently sitting on the KDE desktop and soon going to add the shares to the /media and fstab also going to transfer a couple of the things over and see if the machine picks them up. is there a special place I should be putting them on the drive for them to show up properly?
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Do you have more than one DHCP server enabled? a router or something?
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well i disabled the onboard nic
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I guess that's your problem with finding shares, if you had two NICs during install and disabled one now you need to do some configuration in the web admin.
sounds to me like the 3Com NIC is your external network and the onboard NIC that you disabled is your internal network.
LMCE only finds shares on the internal network, and only when DHCP is enabled, and only when there's no other DHCP.
Sounds like you need to read up on 'single NIC install'
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i disabled both the onboard sound and the onboard NIC and then did a reinstall of LinuxMCE. I forgot that LinuxMCE acts as a DHCP server so I have now turned it off in my router. shouldn't really make much of a difference since I use static IP's well except for the wireless, So far everything is still cabled outside of my laptop.
The odd thing was, LinuxMCE saw all of my shared directories, went through the whole set up of each, made them all public and yet still nothing. hmm, either way we shall see how this goes...
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You made the shares public? You didn't use the LMCE folder structure?
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They are public shares across the network and no i didn't use the LinuxMCE folder structure. Should I have? At this point I am thinking i should just go buy a 500GB drive to store all my media on that system. Damn, i think i should have used the LinuxMCE file structure. would explain something. damn. i'll have to redo that, or look into redoing it without a reinstall...well unless you say otherwise
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Public should work fine for a 'media only' share.
I like to use the LMCE folder structure because that structures my media (you have to move the actual files into the new structure though).
Should work, give it some time. read a bit in the wiki and on the forum to become familiar with the usual problems/sollutions. that helps a lot.
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well I might just do a fresh install and set up the shares int he LinuxMCE structure since well they aren't showing up at all. well nothing is showing up at all...it doesn't really hurt for me to redo the system, outside of time, what really do I have to lose?
I'll have to check out the wiki some more and see what I may have missed.
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Actually I think i will completely redo the system. This is the idea I have in mind:
use the same computer. have 2 harddrives in it. 1 20gb drive for LinuxMCE, then take a secondary drive which at the moment will probably be a 320gb drive, partition it so that music has one and movies has the other. copy all the files I want over to the secondary drive which well I have yet to decide on the filesystem. Install LinuxMCE on the primary drive...then all I have to figure out from there is how to have the music or movies play across the network saying my wife wants to watch Tv and I want to watch something else. I could probably use samba for that and use a linux filesystem to house all the media.
outside of that, the only other thing i can think of doing is setting up a freebsd NFS system and house all the media I want on there and have that shared across the network.
Though I still think i'll reinstall LinuxMCE and use the file structure from that and see if it makes a difference on if the media shows up or not.
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Well looks like it is all working, just need to figure out a couple of issues wuh playback, like how i choose language and subtitles..stuff like that,,,
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So how did you end up fixing your speed issues?
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It seems it was an issue with the on board sound or the on board NIC. I disabled them both since well I don't need either one and the system was much much faster.
so now my system set is:
P4 2.0
512Mb RAM
Nvidia FX 5200 128MB vid card
3Com NIC
SoundBlaster Live Value soundcard
As for the shares, I have no idea how that got fixed. They weren't there last night, checked it this morning and there they were...go figure...
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It takes a while for the files to sync
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odd, considering the first install where the system was slow as hell they appeared, then last night it was a couple of hours...ahh well, it's up and running guess thats all that matters.
All thats left is fine tuning stuff...though I may have to redo some stuff if i can't figure out the dual audio part of some of the stuff. what i mean by that is i have stuff in English and Japanese for audio. For some reason it automatically picks up the English audio, but in all honesty I prefer the Japanese audio with subtitles. I can normally do this under Xine, i just can't get a menu while the vid is playing to change the selection...
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if it is a DVD image, you can use the DVD options menu to set this.
-Thom
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nope, i don't use it at the moment for DVD's. most of the stuff is avi files or divx or along those lines.
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Somone said it takes a while to sync with the shared...how long is to long, and does it matter if the drives are NTFS? I really am starting to wonder if i should set up a large drive in the media center and just have it house all my media
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it doesn't matter what file system your drive is if it's mounted on a NAS/networked PC and shared from there.
do a search on the forum as similar issues have been discussed before. Myself, I am waiting for 710 hoping it will have some fixes and bring LMCE up to date in driver department (then you can also mount an NTFS HDD directly on the core).
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At the moment everything is through shares off of windows machines. I have really been thinking of setting up a NFS just to hold our media be it music or movies as i think i posted in another post I am just not sure if i want to use the media center for it or build a freebsd box...
also had to shut down the DHCP part of it since it was messing up my wireless network. It would assign an IP address, but wouldn't forward it to the router and then to the internet.
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also had to shut down the DHCP part of it since it was messing up my wireless network.
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Which is exactly why your shares aren't detected properly...
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Which I really find that surprising. AM i supposed to run everything off a DHCP server? the only things that are DHCP are my wireless devices, everything else is static IP's. I have also noticed when I move stuff onto the drive it doesn't see it either. Should I really turn the DHCP back on and have two DHCP servers running?
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you should only have one DHCP server running, the one on the core.
DHCP is used to determine if devices appear on the network or not. If DHCP is not enabled on the core, all network based devices have to manually be added via the Web Admin.
The way that I've seen most setups with an existing wireless/router be retrofitted, is that the WAN connection isn't used at all, and all devices are plugged into the LAN side of the router. The DHCP server on the router is then disabled.
-Thom
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hmm...I wonder if i can keep it as is and turn off the DHCP on the router but still use it for the gateway...
also noticed that .mp4 files don't work well on it
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No, don't even bother.
mp4 files by default aren't crawled by UpdateMedia, but this has been fixed in 0710. use the Media Files Sync option in the web admin to select the file, and call it a LinuxMCE Video File.. It will then play properly.
-Thom
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to late...already tried it...
the file has been sync'd and still messes up. i'll try it from the kubuntu desktop and see if it works any better
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I have found my core to be very slow. It's an XP2500 with 512MB RAM. I just accepted that I would have to upgrade it eventually, but then one day after a reboot my CPU use went right down. See the attached image, the dip to the right of the graph.
I assumed some stuff wasn't running but all processes were running, and LMCE was working fine. This lasted a couple of days and then suddenly after another reboot it was back to its usual self again!
I have no idea what causes this as there are no clue in the syslog or dmesg output. The CPU seems to be taken up mostly by "sys" processes (the kernel?). Weird...!
Chris
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No, don't even bother.
mp4 files by default aren't crawled by UpdateMedia, but this has been fixed in 0710. use the Media Files Sync option in the web admin to select the file, and call it a LinuxMCE Video File.. It will then play properly.
-Thom
I dropped the system down to the KDE desktop, and started to play the file in Xine. Xine reported back an error saying that it wasn't running properly. Of course do you think I think I can remember the error? It did tell me to either drop it from 24bpp to 16 bpp also said I should run xine-check which couldn't find a couple of things of xine...damn when i get home again, i'll re run it and let you know what it says...
hmm...is the gyration keyboard supposed to work with linuxmce as well as the mouse?
Chrisbirkinshaw,
could you post more information on your system specs. As people have said to me, it might help us understand more of whats going on with your system if we know the entire setup.
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System is:
NFII Ultra Infinity Mobo
Mobile XP2500+ (undervolted)
512MB RAM
Radeon 7000 (using "radeon" open source driver)
I see the same problems even if I disable the core services and the media director from running in the LMCE launch manager. Perhaps this is an underlying Ubuntu problem in my case.
Chris
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Are you using an onboard NIC and sound?
Have you tried the proprietary drivers from ATI over the open source?
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Using onboard NIC and sound. The card is actually too old to use the ATI binary driver.
At any rate, I get these problems without X running.
It's a weird one...!
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you got those problems without X running? your running it from a terminal? Unless i am mistaking your meaning...
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If I kill the X process the problems persist.
This PC actually used to be a diskless MD in my previous setup, and it didn't show the problems then. Weird.
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i'd try install Kubuntu by itself with no MCE software and see if you have the same problem. Just as a test have you tried disabling the onboard NIC and sound? I'd give that shot and see what happens before the reinstall of just Kubuntu.
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I think I'll hold off till 0710 and then do a fresh install.
best,
Chris
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i've thought of doing the same thing