Sweden
1:st let me say that i realy like the new skins. they are clean and nice. and looks gr8!. but they have some problems for people with GFX Cards with low memory (below 256 meg and your are toast.)
Since the release of the Blue3 Skins i have had problems with greate lag from the skin.
Mostley i can see it when i have the EPG guide and a tv program running in the preview window down in the left corner.
I have been looking at the source code for media portal to understand why this has been introduced since the release of the new blue3 skins.
this is my conclusion.
The blue 3 skins is using far more memory then the blue2 skins.
All Gfx and fonts are converted into textures and loaded into the Gfxcards memory.
when all gfx and fonts are loaded the total texture memory is more then 140 megs. this is causing problems when your are ( like me ) running for example a EEE Box as a TV Client ( the EEE box b202 has a max total of 128 Mb shared memory )
Media portals source code for texuremanagemnt is packing all gfx into several 2048x2048 .png images which is then loaded during request from mediaportal (ex when you press EPG the gfx for EPG is loaded ). (this makes Mediaportal know that all textures is fine, and ready to be used)
The reason for 2048x2048 is to make sure that all gfx will fint inside the created .png fil will fit. ( For example if the background if MP gui is greater then 2048 in width or height the gfx wil lnot fit the textures and this will risult in an error.
Blue3 has some gfx that is max 1280pixels wide so in theory the max texture could be 1280x1280, however since this is textures we are working with all Gfx that are "plain" and dont need fancy gfx could be alot smaler. so the gfx that are 1280 wide could be reduced by over 200% down to 320 pixels and use alot less memory.
So all Gfx that dont Need to be the current large size can be reduced without any visual quality loss!.
and alot of the memory will be released from the GFx memory.
But this is not enough since one of the greatest memory hogs are the fonts.
As an example the SVT font is using around 40 megs of video memory, and this font is not eaven used..
so next step there is to reduce the amount of different fonts to a minimum.
I have reduced all my Gfx, and all my fonts to a state where the skin only uses around a total of 40 megs of texture memory. and i now have in my EEE Box 0 lag!.
Just my 2 cents.
Aa tweaked blue3wide version that should use less memory. ( but some of the gfx is smaller then it needs to be. )
can be found here : https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/1-0-rc4-svn-builds-299/epg-tv-preview-eating-cpu-logs-49434/
Thanks again for a great skin.
/ Jernis.
P.S. I did some code changes to MP source where i reduced the 2048x2048 to 1024x1024 during my test with smaller gfx and managed to the all textures to a total filesize of 7 megs inside the cache. ) this is not possible unless the developers has harder rules for skindevelopers and changes the internal code in MP. But skindevelopers should already today us as small Gfx as possible to makesure that the memory is not wasted. D.s.
Since the release of the Blue3 Skins i have had problems with greate lag from the skin.
Mostley i can see it when i have the EPG guide and a tv program running in the preview window down in the left corner.
I have been looking at the source code for media portal to understand why this has been introduced since the release of the new blue3 skins.
this is my conclusion.
The blue 3 skins is using far more memory then the blue2 skins.
All Gfx and fonts are converted into textures and loaded into the Gfxcards memory.
when all gfx and fonts are loaded the total texture memory is more then 140 megs. this is causing problems when your are ( like me ) running for example a EEE Box as a TV Client ( the EEE box b202 has a max total of 128 Mb shared memory )
Media portals source code for texuremanagemnt is packing all gfx into several 2048x2048 .png images which is then loaded during request from mediaportal (ex when you press EPG the gfx for EPG is loaded ). (this makes Mediaportal know that all textures is fine, and ready to be used)
The reason for 2048x2048 is to make sure that all gfx will fint inside the created .png fil will fit. ( For example if the background if MP gui is greater then 2048 in width or height the gfx wil lnot fit the textures and this will risult in an error.
Blue3 has some gfx that is max 1280pixels wide so in theory the max texture could be 1280x1280, however since this is textures we are working with all Gfx that are "plain" and dont need fancy gfx could be alot smaler. so the gfx that are 1280 wide could be reduced by over 200% down to 320 pixels and use alot less memory.
So all Gfx that dont Need to be the current large size can be reduced without any visual quality loss!.
and alot of the memory will be released from the GFx memory.
But this is not enough since one of the greatest memory hogs are the fonts.
As an example the SVT font is using around 40 megs of video memory, and this font is not eaven used..
so next step there is to reduce the amount of different fonts to a minimum.
I have reduced all my Gfx, and all my fonts to a state where the skin only uses around a total of 40 megs of texture memory. and i now have in my EEE Box 0 lag!.
Just my 2 cents.
Aa tweaked blue3wide version that should use less memory. ( but some of the gfx is smaller then it needs to be. )
can be found here : https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/1-0-rc4-svn-builds-299/epg-tv-preview-eating-cpu-logs-49434/
Thanks again for a great skin.
/ Jernis.
P.S. I did some code changes to MP source where i reduced the 2048x2048 to 1024x1024 during my test with smaller gfx and managed to the all textures to a total filesize of 7 megs inside the cache. ) this is not possible unless the developers has harder rules for skindevelopers and changes the internal code in MP. But skindevelopers should already today us as small Gfx as possible to makesure that the memory is not wasted. D.s.
and explain the main differences as above.