[pylor]

Just curious as to whether anyone has gotten a pi to be decently responsive when it comes to loading up the EPG in xbmc at all. I've tried a couple of things, which I'll list below, but the bottom line is I think that the current implementation of the EPG is just a bit much for the Pi. Loading the EPG takes anywhere between 5-15 seconds and I've had it crash the pi (I lowered the overclock which seemed to help prevent the crash) a couple of times too. Performance wise, the rendering is fine, good enough for a kitchen tv or a bedroom tv. I wouldn't want it on my big screen but for ~$60 I have no problem using it in other places.

Here's a list of things I've tried just incase it was caused by disk access speeds:

1. Using an external USB stick for openelec and an sd card for the operating system - This worked ok, it definitely sped things up a bit when I was using an older SD card, but the issue remained.
2. Buying a new SD card that was as fast as I could find for a decent price. This one has twice the write speeds as my other one and 4x the read speeds depending on random/sustained. Problem still exists but a lot of the slow menu issues are completely gone, only the EPG is still super slow.
3. Using the NEW SD card with the fastest USB 3 stick I own. I know the pi isn't usb 3, but generally the USB3 sticks have fasts writes and reads. Performance may have been slightly better this way but not much. Everything is still pretty quick to load except the EPG.

Has anyone experimented with this much or found a way to make the EPG work a little better on a Pi? I'm editting this post because it looks like the EPG is a standard implementation from XBMC and nothing to do with the actual PVR addon itself (aside from loading the EPG information).

[krustyreturns]

How many days of epg are you downloading? You could try decreasing this. You can also not import channels you don't use.

Just to check if could be an issue on our side you can look at the serverwmc log (see debug tab). After your pi gets the epg data, open the log and you will see a series of commands called 'GetEntries', there will be one of these for each channel you downloaded. For each of these commands it will show how long it took to execute.

How is your performance on displaying your recordings page? I heard complaints that is slow too for pi users.

[pylor]

Looks like most of those calls took between .02 and .05 seconds, with most being .02 or .03

I'm beginning to think it's just due to the nature of the graphical "timeline" epg. I turned the EPG days down to 2, didn't do much, timeline just takes forever to load. I think what I said may have been a bit confusing; the actual downloading of the EPG is fine, it's when you actually select "EPG" from xbmc and it attempts to draw/populate the timeline that the entire thing seizes for ~10 seconds giver or take a few.

For now I've turned it to just show the "now" EPG by default and the performance is much better, but as expected I was immediately asked "what if we want to see what's on in the next hour?" to which I had no proper answer other than "suffer for your lack of planning by loading the timeline EPG for 30 seconds." This was deemed an unacceptable response.

Loading up the recordings tab for me is instant, no problem what so ever there. I only have 3 recordings at the moment though, and the playback was great.

[krustyreturns]

lol, my wife's phrase is "that's not an answer I can accept'. When there are hundreds of recordings, users complain about how long it takes the pi to display them, funny that I haven't heard the same about the epg until your post. Makes me think something is wrong, but I can't think of what it would be. How many channels are there? Also I assume you have the epg database turned on?

I guess we need other pi users to let us know their epg display time.

[Jönke]

Epg timeline loading time 7 sec on 512mb rpi with tvheadend. I have 92 channels

[ursli]

I'm not on a pi but I'm also having a noticeable stutter when switching to epg timeline view on my zotac hd-nd22 (celeron 1.2ghz), it seems to have happened right when we got support for epg entries in the past, so I guess it really is just the amount of data that is needed to load.

[Dilligaf]

My 3 PI load the EPG in about 10-15 seconds. IMO for a $35 HTPC this is more than acceptable.

[Dilligaf]

This was just added to latest Raspbmc test build, not sure if it will make a difference https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/4235

[scarecrow420]

Right so it sounds like it's actually the time it takes the rPi to generate/render the EPG grid rather than the time to load the channel and EPG data from the backend. Unfortunately there isnt much we can do in our addon about that. Im assuming perormance would be better with smaller number of channels, so perhaps the only thing we can offer is that one of the features we want to add is a way to lock down specific clients to specific channel groups (the request came about from a parent wanting their child's XBMC to only show the kids channels etc). This would be a useful feature here too, as you could make a Channel Group for the raspberry pi's containing just some main channels rather than the full 90+ or however many you have. Sure, that does mean you cant watch every channel but here in Australia with our 10 channels or less, I struggle to see how anyone could realistically NEED 90 channels in their alternate HTPC locations (bedrooms, kitchen, whatever) where the rPi's are probably deployed. I plan to add this feature soon

[pylor]

Right so it sounds like it's actually the time it takes the rPi to generate/render the EPG grid rather than the time to load the channel and EPG data from the backend. Unfortunately there isnt much we can do in our addon about that. Im assuming perormance would be better with smaller number of channels, so perhaps the only thing we can offer is that one of the features we want to add is a way to lock down specific clients to specific channel groups (the request came about from a parent wanting their child's XBMC to only show the kids channels etc). This would be a useful feature here too, as you could make a Channel Group for the raspberry pi's containing just some main channels rather than the full 90+ or however many you have. Sure, that does mean you cant watch every channel but here in Australia with our 10 channels or less, I struggle to see how anyone could realistically NEED 90 channels in their alternate HTPC locations (bedrooms, kitchen, whatever) where the rPi's are probably deployed. I plan to add this feature soon

I'd have to agree with you and a lot of the other posters. The EPG loading time isn't a huge deal for me, but to someone coming from a $20 DVR box a month they'll only see the negatives. I should note that I have 530 channels from comcast with this current account. All under 100 are non-hd and can probably be stripped out, as well as about 60-70 channels that are nothing but music. I also believe it's the CPU in the Pi that is the limiting part. I've got an old atom 330 w/ion (2008 technology) running everything swimmingly after a quick openelec update and using the same USB stick as the one in the Pi (prior to the openelec update it would stutter on live tv when it was HD, I was using a 12 beta xbmcbuntu previously). I even have a pentium 4 2.4c computer that can load up the epg quickly. Trying to get the ATi 4650 to actually playback and not crash is a different story.

So yes, I believe it's the CPU power of the Pi being overwhelmed by the number of calls it has to make.