Xbian 1.0 - disappointed

[castalla]

I recently tried Xbian again (after using raspbmc) ...

I'm a little disappointed, while it works well, the user interface and menus are much less fluid and slower than raspbmc achieves There's a definite lag in switching between menus - and occasionally there's an annoying audio 'pop' when switching between menus.

Just my 2 eurocents worth.

[IriDium]

Looking at your previous posts, you are never happy but never willing to add.

Take a tour with beta 1.2 it's fast, efficient, reliable and the best Xbian so far but I'm sure you will find something to complain about. but you still stick with xbian - why is that? Raspbmc, Openelec vi for your custom, but you stick with us? Is that because Xbian is the best?

Please be constructive in any thread and do some research before posting a derogatory comment. And if you do post a thread, follow the guide lines "Please read before you post" a link is provided in my signature for your convenience as you seem to have missed it first time around :-)

I await - with great anticipation - your reply and comments about beta 1.2 - I cannot wait

[mk01]

(25th Sep, 2013 04:12 AM)IriDium Wrote:  reliable and the best Xbian so far but I'm sure you will find something to complain about.

it reminds me of you few weeks ago somehow (from the brighter side - not stupid general comments, but "something" to complain about all over the system

anyhow he could be right. firstly - I don't really remember it anymore and secondly - compare almost 4 months old release with OpenELEC 2 weeks old and RaspBMC for sure October update not yet released?

If XBian needs to get 4months old to be beaten, so be it - I can take it

[raspberry_pd]

(25th Sep, 2013 04:12 AM)IriDium Wrote:  Looking at your previous posts, you are never happy but never willing to add.

A project that can't accept constructive criticism is one that is less likely to flourish IMHO.

(25th Sep, 2013 04:12 AM)IriDium Wrote:  Take a tour with beta 1.2 it's fast, efficient, reliable and the best Xbian so far but I'm sure you will find something to complain about. but you still stick with xbian - why is that? Raspbmc, Openelec vi for your custom, but you stick with us? Is that because Xbian is the best?

Did XBian ever actually achieve a usable version 1.0 yet? Or are you referring to a second beta for version 1, which would then be Version 1.0 beta 2? I know it might sound / read like semantics, and every software project just makes up their own numbering with no inter-project guidelines, but I think the significant failure of 1.0 beta 1, which required an immediate 1.0 beta 1.1 (getting messy isn't it?) was a reasonable grounds for complaint.

(25th Sep, 2013 04:12 AM)IriDium Wrote:  Please be constructive in any thread and do some research before posting a derogatory comment. And if you do post a thread, follow the guide lines "Please read before you post" a link is provided in my signature for your convenience as you seem to have missed it first time around :-)

Agreed, got to be constructive (not that I'm suggesting Castella usually isn't as I've not been reading this forum for a while so I wouldn't know for sure) and if users aren't willing to participate somehow in improving the system, their right to express any dissatisfaction should be somewhat limited I guess.

(25th Sep, 2013 04:12 AM)IriDium Wrote:  I await - with great anticipation - your reply and comments about beta 1.2 - I cannot wait

One thing (apart from not having the time) that stops me from trying new releases is the decentralized XBMC library. I know it can be centralized but most people I've asked about doing that say it's clunky at best.

FWIW I tried RasPlex and out-of-the-box it's reasonably good for a project that appears have been running for less time than XBian, so it's not just RaspBMC vs OpenELEC (though RasPlex is based on OpenELEC) vs XBian.

The thing about Plex having a centralized library all of a sudden have become quite appealing for me but I am also relatively happy with XBian 1.0 Alpha 5. I've even got btsync running on one of my instances of it in the background! Is it possible that XBian's flavour of XBMC can be configured/developed/altered to talk to a Plex server? It would be great if there was an XBMC add-on that allowed an XBian build to talk to a central Plex server. In terms of testing it would potentially be more realistic as well since those who complain about slow menus and so forth, may be actually experiencing this due to larger libraries than your average tester/developer.

A vanilla install of XBMC can never be compared to an in-action one, with a substantial library, IMHO. Perhaps XBian could reduce tester complaints about speed if everyone tested with a significant-sized, identical and consistent library of files? Might sound hard to achieve but this is the era of bittorrent

[mk01]

(1st Oct, 2013 11:48 AM)raspberry_pd Wrote:  A vanilla install of XBMC can never be compared to an in-action one, with a substantial library, IMHO. Perhaps XBian could reduce tester complaints about speed if everyone tested with a significant-sized, identical and consistent library of files? Might sound hard to achieve but this is the era of bittorrent

I never had my hands on the Plex system so will not compare - simply I can't. XBMC started as being standalone player long time ago and Plex was reworked with a different target group in mind.

User has to grown - and user's needs + user's hw appliances - to feel a full benefit or at least being able to understand the benefits.

Majority of users with one piece of HW simply don't even need to grow there. They will not benefit from such redesign.

I started the same way, with old ATV2. Then I bought a second and now have 2ATVs and 2RPIs. Media library developed as well and finally ended on central dedicated NFS share. And because all evolves, XBMC was forced to make it possible to take some advantage of such setups - of course because of it's design to serve as one standalone media center it will hardly grow to a full client/server appliance, but with central SQL hosted libraries and shared shares/settings/Thumbnails it at least makes things be really centrally managed.

Of course this doesn't move transact operations out of the local box and you can see it immediately if you try to browse music library with 25.000 songs. To be honest, it's not the right feeling even on Quad core i7 running XBMC. It is maybe only thanks to my love to apple and Cloud services I don't feel the urge to try Plex approach.

But again, you will hardly explain benefits of warm water to our people living whole lives in forest.

I remember there was a Plex client for ATV2, don't remember if it was XBMC add-on (probably not) or jailbreak + client as application.

I'm not sure if for instance uPNP can provide feel of Plex approach to XBMC in future (if ever), but to be honest you would again need special powerful XBMC install again to act as uPNP provider and then you could already been asking, why not throw it away and migrate to something what is already there for years and proven like Plex.

---

btw: as to the topic of being contructive non constructive - people are who they are - and even if personally hating the discussions "who can piss longer", somehow I can understand people being angry - they will sleep over and day will looks brighter again

(and this is meant generally, didn't want to stress IriDium or even Castala).

[x7dude]

Hey,

Not to jump on the negative bandwagon, but I feel like i'm experienceing a slow UI as well. Menu navigation is slow and sometimes freezes, playing "big" files sometimes stalls on initialize/play... and sometimes things just freeze up during playback (leaving me no choice but to reboot).

I'm not complaining, the project seems awesome, I'm just afraid that I've inadvertently screwed something up, forgot to update something, or just don't have the best settings, so... is this a problem you've encountered before, and is there something in particular I should google to find a solution?? I've already OCed my system to 'High' and updated everything throught the Settings>Xbian>Update menu, but maybe there's something else? Playback itself seems to work great the rest of the time, even full HD with DTS...

Grateful for any tips, tricks, insights or ideas!

Cheers!

[IriDium]

The best way to "debug" this situation is to run without any additions - transmission, spotify etc. Do you have the same problems? Beta 1.0 did have problems, but alas so did Beta 1.1 (we're nor perfect) however Beta 2 is almost fully tested and to date is almost perfect.

Wait a while, and get the Beta 2 release and you will be happy - it is slick, responsive and damn well fast.

[x7dude]

(29th Oct, 2013 04:49 AM)IriDium Wrote:  The best way to "debug" this situation is to run without any additions - transmission, spotify etc. Do you have the same problems? Beta 1.0 did have problems, but alas so did Beta 1.1 (we're nor perfect) however Beta 2 is almost fully tested and to date is almost perfect.

Thanks for the advice. Let's see, are 'additions' and 'add-ons' the same thing, ie. are we talking things I would have to install myself after initial setup? Cause I haven't gotten around to any of that. All I've done is write the beta1.1 image to the sdcard with your installer, power up, add a network location ('regular' shared resource on a Win8 machine, connected over wired gig-eth to my router which is connected by cable to my Xbian RPi) and let it scrape all the info (left it overnight)... then boom... slow.

I was thinking maybe there's some service or something that's activated by default that I should be turning off to get the smoothest GUI performance?

I've also ordered some heatsinks after which I was thinking I'd try to OC is more, but at the same time I'm thinking that should be the problem, as others seemingly get snappy GUIs at OC 'High'?

Quote:Wait a while, and get the Beta 2 release and you will be happy - it is slick, responsive and damn well fast.

Sweet! Can't wait! I had a quick google but couldn't find an ETA on that, are we talking weeks, months, end of year?

[rikardo1979]

@x7dude how big is your media library? @mk01 have reported few times that when he add a big library of media (like 1000s of songs and 100s of movies and 100s or even 1000s of TV show episodes) and you use it with default Confluence skin than the XBMC GUI is get a sluggish and by changing to I think Amber skin the results are much better.
But to be honest, if your library is big than the best way would be to use shared library on MySQL and keep it on server or the machine where your media are stored

[x7dude]

(29th Oct, 2013 05:55 AM)rikardo1979 Wrote:  @x7dude how big is your media library? @mk01 have reported few times that when he add a big library of media (like 1000s of songs and 100s of movies and 100s or even 1000s of TV show episodes) and you use it with default Confluence skin than the XBMC GUI is get a sluggish and by changing to I think Amber skin the results are much better.
But to be honest, if your library is big than the best way would be to use shared library on MySQL and keep it on server or the machine where your media are stored

Yeah, we're probably talking 200 movies and 2000 episodes. I'll give amber a go and look into MySQL; never used it but sometime's gotta be the first right...

cheers