thompson
August 19th, 2008, 06:52 AM
Hi Team Boxee!
First of all, I'd like to say, that I think that once Boxee is finished (don't care when that will be, because all good things take a while...) it will pretty much kick every other app's a$$! :) You really did create a wonderful piece of software! As a long time XBMC user (had 2 XBOXes but both died because of the Power Supply) I am waiting to see, how this is going to be in the future!
Today I received my invitation for participating in the Alpha Test, and as I was eager to see, how it is, I tried it immediately (although I'm at work at the moment...:))
Hardware:
- Dell Latitude D620 (Notebook)
- DualCore Intel T2400 (1.83GHz)
- 1 GB RAM
- Intel 945 GM/GMS VGA
Software:
- Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
Everything you will read below was tried with compiz disabled, but I also tried it with compiz enabled -> It didn't make a difference.
Having read through other bug reports first, to minimize the possibility of posting redundant information, I also tried different resolutions, which also had no effect on the behaviour described below. The resolutions tried, were 1280*800, 1280*768 and 1024*768. I didn't try 800*600 since I figured out, that there would also be no difference.
I started the Boxee binary directly from shell in /usr/boxee, but I also started it through your "wrapper"-script, called run-boxee-desktop. Excuse me, if wrapper-script is the wrong expression for this. I also tried to start it with or without sudo. Again: No difference.
I have attached six text files to this posting, where you can see some output on the shell, from where it was started tried with different resolutions. Three files called test_<n>_<date>.txt and also the corresponding xbmc logfiles, called accordingly xbmc.log_test_<n>.txt (where n = 1-3, since I did three tests. In fact I did more than three tests, but those were the tests, where I made notes of the things that happened...)
Personally I cannot see any differences in the attached files, but I must also say, that I didn't really look through them or diff'ed them to see if there are, but then again, I am no coder: I couldn't tell, what's meaningful and what's not. But maybe they will help you to get any further.
I will try Boxee on my PC at home, because I want to see if it performs better there. I will also write report on this.
Moving on with my report:
-------------------------
- Boxee is extremely slow on this machine. Every action takes approx. 6 seconds. Although I must say, it is astonishing, that it is sluggish in a "steady" kind of way. E.g. switching to a menu entry; accept a command given by keyboard etc. or just logging in.
- The first time I started it and added my user I had created before on your site, I had of course to enter my credentials. I noticed, that because of the sluggish behaviour, it didn't accept multiple keystrokes. To make this clearer: If your username is e.g. "thompson", I had to type "t" wait 6 secs, then "h", wait 6 secs and so on. If I did this faster (i.e. before a letter actually appeared) it did not get the letters typed in between, but only showed the last letter typed.
- As soon as I managed to log in, the left-hand-menu appeared, but I could not choose "What's new". Boxee did it's confirming Beep, and I could see in the Background some boxes being loaded (again, horribly slow), but I could not do anything in it. The "What's new" entry in the menu just flashed away for a bit, and then reappeared, and that was that. All other menu items worked.
- Because we need to use an HTTP-Proxy at my workplace, since they are kinda restrictive folks (Baaaaad!), I added it to Boxee's settings. I navigated through the Settings Menu to the Network --> Proxy Settings, and entered my credentials. I had the feeling, that it did run a "little" faster, but not in a useable way. And in an overall manner, it didn't help to overcome the behaviour experienced in the previous paragraph.
- I didn't add any sources, because I am not at home, and therefore have absolutely no mediafiles here, with which I could try those things. I will do that as soon as I am at home, and have the time for this, and I'll let you know. But I wanted to point out, that the slow reaction cannot be due to the "scanning" mentioned in Kine's Bug report (http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=175).
- I tried to go to the Videos section, though and play an Internet Video. This kinda worked, but again: Unwatchably slow. Audio began before video, and there were tremendous lags with the video stream. I just tried the CNN "feed", and nothing else. I didn't try anything with music at all.
- As I thought, that it could be faster to navigate with the mouse, I also tried to enable that function, as it was posted in this thread (http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=107). But I didn't do this through the Settings menu, but instead edited guisettings.xml in ~/.boxee/UserData/ with vi. This worked, but the mouse was also extremely slow, and wasn't much of a help. But I noticed, that the Keyboard had stopped working! I killed off Boxee through the shell, edited guisettings.xml and set the mouse to "false" as it was before, but the Keyboard still did not work. One should think that it doesn't matter, whether you edit the *.xml files or alter the Settings through the menu. As I said, I am a long time XBMC user, and have always configured it manually from Day 1 I got it, which always worked perfectly. I didn't try to delete the whole ~/.boxee/ Dir, and let Boxee create it again. But I will try that, and tell you if that did the trick...
- One other thing, but this is not exactly a bug, I am just interested in the fact where this comes from. As soon as I had entered my Proxy credentials I mentioned earlier, Boxee was so kind to show me some weather info, which is nice! But I didn't set that up anywhere, so where did this come from? Also the weather info it showed me, is wrong. I live in Greece, and we have nearly 35 degrees Celsius today, but Boxee showed me 23 degrees. I am guessing, that it gets that info from my Profile I set up at your site, and I couldn't choose "Greece" or "Athens" (where I live) in the Dropdown Menu of my Profile. Am I the only one from Greece? :)
I think that's all I experienced. Should you need more information, let me know. As said: I'll try again on my Home PC and see, if I get any better results.
Sorry for making such a gigantic posting, but I tried to describe as thorough as possible what I experienced with Boxee.
Regards,
Thompson
First of all, I'd like to say, that I think that once Boxee is finished (don't care when that will be, because all good things take a while...) it will pretty much kick every other app's a$$! :) You really did create a wonderful piece of software! As a long time XBMC user (had 2 XBOXes but both died because of the Power Supply) I am waiting to see, how this is going to be in the future!
Today I received my invitation for participating in the Alpha Test, and as I was eager to see, how it is, I tried it immediately (although I'm at work at the moment...:))
Hardware:
- Dell Latitude D620 (Notebook)
- DualCore Intel T2400 (1.83GHz)
- 1 GB RAM
- Intel 945 GM/GMS VGA
Software:
- Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
Everything you will read below was tried with compiz disabled, but I also tried it with compiz enabled -> It didn't make a difference.
Having read through other bug reports first, to minimize the possibility of posting redundant information, I also tried different resolutions, which also had no effect on the behaviour described below. The resolutions tried, were 1280*800, 1280*768 and 1024*768. I didn't try 800*600 since I figured out, that there would also be no difference.
I started the Boxee binary directly from shell in /usr/boxee, but I also started it through your "wrapper"-script, called run-boxee-desktop. Excuse me, if wrapper-script is the wrong expression for this. I also tried to start it with or without sudo. Again: No difference.
I have attached six text files to this posting, where you can see some output on the shell, from where it was started tried with different resolutions. Three files called test_<n>_<date>.txt and also the corresponding xbmc logfiles, called accordingly xbmc.log_test_<n>.txt (where n = 1-3, since I did three tests. In fact I did more than three tests, but those were the tests, where I made notes of the things that happened...)
Personally I cannot see any differences in the attached files, but I must also say, that I didn't really look through them or diff'ed them to see if there are, but then again, I am no coder: I couldn't tell, what's meaningful and what's not. But maybe they will help you to get any further.
I will try Boxee on my PC at home, because I want to see if it performs better there. I will also write report on this.
Moving on with my report:
-------------------------
- Boxee is extremely slow on this machine. Every action takes approx. 6 seconds. Although I must say, it is astonishing, that it is sluggish in a "steady" kind of way. E.g. switching to a menu entry; accept a command given by keyboard etc. or just logging in.
- The first time I started it and added my user I had created before on your site, I had of course to enter my credentials. I noticed, that because of the sluggish behaviour, it didn't accept multiple keystrokes. To make this clearer: If your username is e.g. "thompson", I had to type "t" wait 6 secs, then "h", wait 6 secs and so on. If I did this faster (i.e. before a letter actually appeared) it did not get the letters typed in between, but only showed the last letter typed.
- As soon as I managed to log in, the left-hand-menu appeared, but I could not choose "What's new". Boxee did it's confirming Beep, and I could see in the Background some boxes being loaded (again, horribly slow), but I could not do anything in it. The "What's new" entry in the menu just flashed away for a bit, and then reappeared, and that was that. All other menu items worked.
- Because we need to use an HTTP-Proxy at my workplace, since they are kinda restrictive folks (Baaaaad!), I added it to Boxee's settings. I navigated through the Settings Menu to the Network --> Proxy Settings, and entered my credentials. I had the feeling, that it did run a "little" faster, but not in a useable way. And in an overall manner, it didn't help to overcome the behaviour experienced in the previous paragraph.
- I didn't add any sources, because I am not at home, and therefore have absolutely no mediafiles here, with which I could try those things. I will do that as soon as I am at home, and have the time for this, and I'll let you know. But I wanted to point out, that the slow reaction cannot be due to the "scanning" mentioned in Kine's Bug report (http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=175).
- I tried to go to the Videos section, though and play an Internet Video. This kinda worked, but again: Unwatchably slow. Audio began before video, and there were tremendous lags with the video stream. I just tried the CNN "feed", and nothing else. I didn't try anything with music at all.
- As I thought, that it could be faster to navigate with the mouse, I also tried to enable that function, as it was posted in this thread (http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=107). But I didn't do this through the Settings menu, but instead edited guisettings.xml in ~/.boxee/UserData/ with vi. This worked, but the mouse was also extremely slow, and wasn't much of a help. But I noticed, that the Keyboard had stopped working! I killed off Boxee through the shell, edited guisettings.xml and set the mouse to "false" as it was before, but the Keyboard still did not work. One should think that it doesn't matter, whether you edit the *.xml files or alter the Settings through the menu. As I said, I am a long time XBMC user, and have always configured it manually from Day 1 I got it, which always worked perfectly. I didn't try to delete the whole ~/.boxee/ Dir, and let Boxee create it again. But I will try that, and tell you if that did the trick...
- One other thing, but this is not exactly a bug, I am just interested in the fact where this comes from. As soon as I had entered my Proxy credentials I mentioned earlier, Boxee was so kind to show me some weather info, which is nice! But I didn't set that up anywhere, so where did this come from? Also the weather info it showed me, is wrong. I live in Greece, and we have nearly 35 degrees Celsius today, but Boxee showed me 23 degrees. I am guessing, that it gets that info from my Profile I set up at your site, and I couldn't choose "Greece" or "Athens" (where I live) in the Dropdown Menu of my Profile. Am I the only one from Greece? :)
I think that's all I experienced. Should you need more information, let me know. As said: I'll try again on my Home PC and see, if I get any better results.
Sorry for making such a gigantic posting, but I tried to describe as thorough as possible what I experienced with Boxee.
Regards,
Thompson