Very Sluggish UI on aTV

[rshetler]

Let me pre-face this by saying I love boxee. I love what this product does and where it is heading. I am running the latest and greatest bits on my MBP and my AppleTV 2.2.

With all of that beng said I wanted to reach out and see if others are experiencing the same thing as I. Boxee on my MBP flies through the UI controls, through menus, browsing all movies, browsing all TV series, etc. On my aTV this is very much not the case. I understand we are dealing with two very differnt peices of hardware but I guess I expected the aTV UI expereince to be a little better. At least on par with how quickly I can navigate around the regular old aTV menus.

Are others perceiving the UI on aTV as really very slow? Is there steps to help this? Reimage my aTV etc?

Thanks!

[mwunder]

I don't know how long you have had Boxee on ATV, but this latest is a great improvement on the pre-October 20th release and I suspect it will only get better.

Sure, I wish that some of the UI gets improved, like playback control and a search function. But I definitely prefer this release over the previous and can only imagine the coming improvements. Remember that this piece of software does a lot more than Front Row on the ATV and it is Alpha.

Another thing I tell myself when I can get a bit frustrated...this is FREE and I sure couldn't create what the team has accomplished thus far.

I think that the response is pretty snappy and maybe a fresh install would help, though I can't guarantee it. I have done it twice before this latest release.

[jeckle]

have you upgraded your version of boxee to the latest one?

[budgie999]

Hello all -

I'm having the same problem on my aTV with boxee. I hear what you are saying mwunder, this is a bound to be a great media center application... and yes, i know it's alpha... and i know it's free.... i love being on the ground floor of this program but seriously, it's so slow incredibly slow on my atv that it's actually unusable. I'm not just being picky.

Has something gone wrong on my system? Did I muck up the settings? Should I wipe the box clean and start anew? Or is this just how it is for now until the bugs get worked out?

Any advice from anyone with a similar problem would be great!

thanks.

[jeremya]

I just installed the latest version of Boxee on a brand new Apple TV less than a week ago and UI might be a little slow, but no where near unusable.

-- Jeremy

[mwunder]

I agree with jeremya...it is no where unusable. The UI is not as clean as the ATV UI, but there is so much more that it deals with.

Are you WiFi or hard wired? I am hard wired. Again, I think this latest release is by far improved over the previous pre-Oct 20th release.

Maybe a clean install is needed.

Need Launcher .4 and I have read that others with issues seem to stem from the patchstick and the USB key not being ideal pairing.

[jeremya]

I agree with jeremya...it is no where unusable. The UI is not as clean as the ATV UI, but there is so much more that it deals with.

Are you WiFi or hard wired? I am hard wired. Again, I think this latest release is by far improved over the previous pre-Oct 20th release.

Maybe a clean install is needed.

Need Launcher .4 and I have read that others with issues seem to stem from the patchstick and the USB key not being ideal pairing.

Well to narrow things down a bit I am on Wifi and I am having no troubles with the UI being slow.

[kylemurphey]

I don't know if this is in my head, but boxee seemed to run much better when I set my aTV to output 720p instead of 1080i.

[rshetler]

That is an interesting comment because the thing that interests me is that people seem to be getting a different experience with different setups.

I watched a few youtube clips of someone walking through the UI and it seemed snappier than mine.

Could this be linked to a video refresh thing? (My aTV is currently hooked up to my crappy 27inch TV running on 480p over component cables) The guy in the video had a high-def LCD.

[budgie999]

I agree with jeremya...it is no where unusable. The UI is not as clean as the ATV UI, but there is so much more that it deals with.

Are you WiFi or hard wired? I am hard wired. Again, I think this latest release is by far improved over the previous pre-Oct 20th release.

Maybe a clean install is needed.

Need Launcher .4 and I have read that others with issues seem to stem from the patchstick and the USB key not being ideal pairing.

My appleTV is hardwired to my network, but the computer that serves the media is WiFi. However, I'm not even talking about looking at content. Just moving around the menus to get to the content is painful. As in, click, click, then put the remote down and do something else while you wait for it to respond.

I'm going to take your suggestion and reset to factory and do a clean install. I'll report back.

Thanks.

[mwunder]

Your UI experience is definitely a 180 from mine. I do not have those issues. I can only it must be frustrating.

I would agree and try the clean install. Maybe try a different USB Stick.

Regarding resolution settings...

I used to have my ATV as 1080p since that is my TV's native format. However, when turning on the TV it would take a bit to show the picture...like the HDMI sync was taking long. Funny thing was that when I left Boxee on...the picture would come up immediately. I think it is the HDCP handshake...yesterday I had to reboot my ATV because a movie rented on ATV wouldn't play because it said my setup didn't support HDCP. Huh? It did yesterday. The only thing that fixed it was a reboot.

I now run with ATV at 720p...other than having to adjust the screen via video calibration...it seems to run the same.

[rshetler]

I've flattened and rebuilt my apple TV through the V1 aTV software to the 2.2 update. Then a clear install off my patch stick, and an update to 3964.

Things seem a bit snappier. I have hammered on every hack and crack I could find in the past on that aTV so that could certainly have something to do with it. I will report back if I find any symptoms returning for some reason.

[mwunder]

I too have a V1 version. Though Boxee is the first "hack" that I have ever implemented...just didn't feel like opening up the unit (that was way back I know) and I have to make sure it is family friendly...not just tech geek friendly that only I can use it. One thing I really like about ATV.

I am glad that it seems to be snappier...who knows what all those "hacks" did to your unit.

[themacguy]

Was your atv slow all around or just during certain moments? I ask because mine seems fine (could be a bit faster, but not annoying) UNLESS I try to load movies I have saved on an external USB. Going to the Video section and then Movies or TV takes an incredibly long time to load and then is VERY slow. It's pretty much unusable. The movies have already been loaded by boxee but accessing them is nearly impossible. Were you experience something along the same lines or different?

[rshetler]

For me things were and still are slow loading my "Movies" view and my "TV Shows" view. Other menu transitions were pretty slow before the re-install those seem a bit better.

[marcel]

guys are you having trouble with the loading of movies after boxee has indexed your external ?correct ? ..when you select the movies or tv shows it takes a while for the content to be displayed...do you have alot of media content? if you change the view does it load the movies quicker?

[budgie999]

guys are you having trouble with the loading of movies after boxee has indexed your external ?correct ? ..when you select the movies or tv shows it takes a while for the content to be displayed...do you have alot of media content? if you change the view does it load the movies quicker?

My experience was that after boxee scanned my media drives and that whole process was done, it was incredibly slow just simply navigating through the menus... even the top layer menues... settings, account...etc... stuff with no media. then of course going to movies where the thumbnails come up was just as slow if not slower. clicking from movie to movie was painful.

I have probably about 20 movies and maybe 40 episodes of TV shows?

Changing the view didn't make things go faster.

I wiped the box last night and will re-install boxee this weekend and report back.

[traviswu]

well, I've been using boxee for about 2 weeks. coming from a xbmc user, I love Boxee very much. However I too think it is running slow on ATV. with the great features that I am getting, this is the price that I would pay.

Just want to mention, after adding about 300 movies, it now takes about 20 to 30 seconds to load the first page after clicking on "movies" button.

I am getting a faster NAS this week so I'll let you know if anything improves.

[marcel]

guys keep me posted...:)

[traviswu]

ok. I have installed and migrated all my data to a QNAP T 509 Pro NAS device (which has gigabit NIC and tested can run on 30MB / sec) .
Here is some number:
1 - browse to anything then return to the main screen : 13 secs to complete loading
2 - browse from home screen to Movies : 20 secs to complete loading (405 movie titles / folders)
3 - browse from home screen to TV shows: 10 secs to complete loading ( 28 TV shows )
4 - repeating exactly the same actions takes the same amount of time. ( so some heavy computation was done every time? )

for 2), I feel it would be a lot faster if I can make the list view saved for movies but currently there is a bug in it.

I love boxee, but 20 secs every time when browsing to movies is very annoying. anyway I can make loading time better ? regardless, I love Boxee.

[sohofrankie]

Hi all,
First, I really like Boxee and am genuinely excited with what it offers. I look forward to its progression.
My experience is as follows
Clean APT purchased about 3 weeks ago and upgraded to 2.2 immediately (purchased solely for XMBC and Boxee
Installed the Patchstick as per http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator/
Played with XBMC until I got my Boxee invite came (thanks)
Got the invite and started playing with Boxee

My setup
NAS - QNAP TS409 Pro
Wireless - 802.11n (not exclusive because of the pesky Zune -which is actually quite good and synchs like a good child)
Signal and Bndwidth - 80-100% always and real bandwidth from ATV to NAS is consistently 6MBytes per sec (not including overloading NAS on purpose)
APT - Clean 2.2 purchase in October 2008
TV - 23" Samsung LCD 768 resolution over HDMI

Comparson of XMBC and Boxee re responsiveness
XMBC is noticably more reponsive. That is not to say that Boxee is not usable but there is a noticable (.5 to 4 sec lag on actions) and when a video is playing and one is navigating the interface the responsiveness is not comparable with consumer electonics where as XMBC is. I cannot definitely say that it is a feature of my network so I will test by using wired Gb ethernet tomorrow.

Excuse my naivety but i) does ATV have a hardware H.264 decompression engine and ii) does Boxee support it or plan to. It seems that DivX is a better solution than m4v despite file sizes of DivX files being 2.5+ times larger
Cheers all

[MILE]

I must say that I'm having the same negative experience as a few other posters here -- Boxee is painfully slow on my AppleTV...! Actually that is one of the reasons why I consider dumping it for the time being and going back to using BackRow + Sapphire again...

Navigating through the menus feels like wading through a tarpit, you get stuck all the time...waiting for a response and watching the page build up...

It's like it has to reload every bit of data all over again whenever I move around...!? Changing from a TV show up to the top level takes several seconds sometimes...which may not sound much, but it sure adds up...

XBMC feels way snappier and of course so does Sapphire under BackRow...

So I don't know if it has something to do with caching or reloading data or whatever -- only thing I know that it's so sluggish sometimes that -- even though you might consider it "usable" -- it's just no fun to use it at all...! :(

:: M ::

[knoxor]

I also have experienced the slow response when navigating movies. I have about 300 movies on a NAS. All network points are hardwired. While not unusable the response is very slow.

Is there anyway that Boxee can cache all its movie information when the ATV starts up. Are we able to physically store the movie thumbnail images on disk rather than requesting them from imdb etc each time we access the movie folder ? Would this help speed up navigation ?

[jamesfoster]

Thumbnails are already cached on the aTV.

I was thinking it might be possible to write out the UI to a file so it loads up in milliseconds. Then update it with any changes while the thumbs load.

For me, the latest version is painfully slow. If the aTV can't support boxee at a reasonable speed you might think about phasing out support for it.

[marcel]

has the slow ui been only in the last version? Does this happen when you are adding large shares ..even when all the content has been recognized is the ui still slow..

[RomanG]

I have a ATV hardwired to my network for internet content, and other personal media is streaming through a iMac on wifi back to the same network hub that the ATV is hardwired to. The ATV is connected to a old Samsung Plasma EDTV screen with max reso (I think) of 480p. (mind you not at 50Hz refresh)

There are times when Boxee is extremely sluggish, to the point of 'put your remote down' and wait. But, yet, at other times it works flawless, is quick and snappy.

Though I have not been able to detect a constant or predictive trigger event that causes the sluggish-ness, I have detected a few times, that when Boxee gets sluggish, the ATV is either syncing back with iT on the iMac, or actual content (like pre-paid season pass) episodes, have been automatically downloaded onto the iMac via iT, and now the ATV is transfering the file from the iMac to itself. I know both scenarios sound like the same thing ... however there are times when the content was bought on the ATV like music etc. and the synch is the other way around.

In either case, I think it impacts the CPU utilization and Boxee suffers in the process.

Just an observation ...

[jamesfoster]

has the slow ui been only in the last version? Does this happen when you are adding large shares ..even when all the content has been recognized is the ui still slow..

no, It has been like this for the last couple of versions i've installed.

It has been running for a few weeks now, only adding a trickle of new files each week. So I assume it has finished recognizing everything it can. There's still some stuff that it hasn't recognised like music videos and Internet TV like PurePwnage etc.

The UI is slow no matter what you're doing. Home screen, Movies, Internet Videos. Everything is really slow.

[justinlarsen]

My ATV Boxee setup was pretty snappy before I applied the Dec 15th update. I seem to be having way more crashes, lags in menu navigation, and choppier streams for content that had no problems before (CBS/Comedy Central, Hulu always gave me dropped frames every 1 - 2 min) I am going to try and lower my resolution from 1080i -> 720P or 480P as my plasma is old school and the native resolution is only 480P anyways.

Also I have an unhealthily amount of content linked thru a SMB server. 8000+ Videos and 3000+ Music Albums

[marcel]

guys can you test Settings>Appearance>Screen>Vertical Blank Sync and try disabled or Enabled during video playback and see if this helps..

[ShakeBobWillis]

For me, the latest version is painfully slow. If the aTV can't support boxee at a reasonable speed you might think about phasing out support for it.

I'd hazard a guess that it can support Boxee since I don't seem to be having speed issues with the menus. Then again I don't have 300 ripped movies. I've got about 500GB of media running off of an external HD via the USB port on the Apple TV and don't see any really slow UI problems.

[Carniphage]

Yeah, it's unacceptably slow.
If you are scrolling through movies, each click on the remote is followed by a painful 1 second delay before the next line appears.

My guess is that it is not caching scaled-down thumbnails - but caching the full-sized cover art images.

C.

[chriskuta]

First thing, wait until all your media has been indexed, if you're using boxee after setting up network sources, chances are its using cpu cycles indexing media.

Once all the indexing is done, I have still noticed some delays with the boxee menu. I think this is related to samba networking - specifically when accessing external NAS devices. Samba ( Windows networking ) is known to have poor and slow name (NetBIOS) resolution under certain conditions. ( how many times have you surfed to a windows network share and it takes ages to appear or never appears at all and then five mins later its there again )

Few things, make sure you have the same WORKGROUP set on both boxee and your NAS. You could setup an LMHOSTS file which can improve name resolution across multiple subnets ( as is sometimes the case with wireless ).

http://oreilly.com/catalog/samba/chapter/book/ch07_03.html

HTH - still looking for alternatives, setting up local Apple Talk mounts might be an option for me as my Lacie supports Apple Talk shares.

[Carniphage]

I don't think indexing or SAMBA explains this.

A movie directory holds perhaps 100 entries. It takes Samba perhaps a few seconds to make an initial connection and perhaps a second to retrieve the directory. After that point the network should not be an issue.

Boxee is slow while *scrolling through* that directory. Are you suggesting that Boxee refetches the directory for every single line?

My guess is that Boxee is not efficiently caching cover thumbnails. The poorly scaled appearance of the cover art in the interface suggests that the artwork has not be resized and refiltered.

C.