Feedback on useability (various)

[TheBatfink]

Thats exactly what I'm hoping, 2.0 is 2.0a.. Im sure I remember when I brought it this chipset was one of the better intergrated ones, and it was definately aimed at the lower end desktop / HTPC market because of HDCP compliant HDMI. I mean for me its usable, but moving through menus feels a little lagged / slow / unresponsive compared to the crispy MPI, and changing screens seems slow / transisition isnt smooth or pretty.. But then its Alpha and not a all bells and whistles skin either so maybe expecting a little too much!

[frodo]

sounds weird:
I run MP-II nice & smooth on my laptop which is
- AMD Turion 2GHZ (single core),
-1GB ram
- integrated NVidia 6150 Go with shared video ram
Notice i did set the video ram to 128MB in the bios

Now the only time it 'lags' a little bit is when you open up a new plugin for the first time
Let take my videos as example:

The first time (after starting MP-II) you go to for example my videos, it lags a bit
since it load & initializes the video plugin
You might see a wait-cursor for a brief moment before the my videos screem appears

From that point, using the video plugin is fast
and re-entering the video plugin at any point later on is instant


If this is not the case for you, then you might want to check the cpu% used.
For me MP-II is using 3%-6% cpu (only during plugin initialisation & loading its more)

Frodo

[TheBatfink]

When im using mediaportal II im not seeing more than 10% usage, with about 43mb memory usage.

I think one thing that makes me think something is "lagging" if thats the right word is, when just scrolling up and down the menu items on the home screen, most of the time they scroll quite smoothly and there is a fade in fade out transistion, but if I set and press up five or six times (not rapid succession but actually allowing the menu to move first) sometimes it just snaps to the next menu without any transition?

Ive had it lock up on me a couple of times to when just dropping in and out of menu items trying to replicate this lagging issue. This is most likely down to the alpha status I guess, just adding it in case you guys didnt expect it and maybe it could be useful feedback.

To be honest, the lagging this is quite a small issue and I've no doubt in the finished product it will all be sweet, just paniced me it might not run on my system more than anything!

[neverino]

Originally Posted by frodo

Yes we have.
The VLC approach is ruled out simply because it does not use h/w accelerated video decoding
That said, MP-II is opensource so anyone can make a 3th party VLC-plugin if he/she desires

Frodo

Hi,
do you mean that a GPU with HW MPG2 decoding will be useless?
thanks
Nev

[frodo]

do you mean that a GPU with HW MPG2 decoding will be useless?

No, i never said that?

Internal directshow based player:
+ you get h/w accelerated decoding for formats like wmv,mpg-2, h264,...
+ can be perfectly integrated with the rest of MP-II
+ provides the best user expierence & usability
- requires external codecs

External based players (VLC/powerdvd/zoomplayer/...):
- Some external players dont have H/W accelerated decoding for formats like wmv,mpg-2,h264,...
(example VLC has not)
- it cannot be perfectly integrated with the rest of MP-II
- gives a bad user experience since you are working with multiple seperate applications
+ no messing around with external codecs since the external apps do this for you
+ provides support for HD-DVD & blueray playback (when using powerdvd)

[neverino]

sorry Frodo,
i realize just now that you were saying the opposite...
thanks for clarification
cheers