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Remote Buddy Forum

Overview 

AuthorThread
User

26.06.2008 16:32:41
EyeTV + Remote Buddy = choppy full screen
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This posting is older than 6 months and can contain outdated information.
As the subject suggests, whenever I have remote buddy running, for some reason full screen mode is extremely choppy in EyeTV latest version.

I am using an external screen via mini-VGA output to 1920x1200 from my C2D black macbook.

As soon as I open RB, full screen choppiness starts immediately. When I quit RB, immediately it becomes smooth again. This happens with interlacing on/off. In windowed mode it is fine to a certain size, when the window is around 75% of the screen size it becomes choppy.

I could understand / deal with it if it only became choppy when RB displays a message on the screen, but it is choppy 100% of the time, even when RB is doing nothing, from the millisecond it is launched. I thought it could be perhaps something to do with bluetooth searching, but I disabled bluetooth on my system, and there was no change.

VLC plays full screen movies 100%, even 720p videos (compared to EyeTV which struggles even with 576i SD).

This is the only thing stopping me from purchasing RB. It's a top program, and soon as I overcome this little hiccup I will be buying it, and showing it to my other mac-using friends.

RB + PS3 BD remote ftw!

These entries from the FAQ may be relevant to this topic:

Behaviours - Support for iTunes® & AirPlay®
Hardware - Apple® Remote
Hardware - EyeTV Receiver
Hardware - Harmony® Smart Control
Hardware - Sony® BD Remote Control
Hardware - Wii™ Remote
User

26.06.2008 22:34:17
Re: EyeTV + Remote Buddy = choppy full screen
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This posting is older than 6 months and can contain outdated information.
Thanks for asking.

I'm afraid that this is not really a Remote Buddy specific problem (as 
all Remote Buddy does is open a translucent window - so nothing 
unusual, really), but more of a performance problem of the chipset 
graphics of the MacBook.

OS X graphics system utilizes OpenGL a lot to offload work to the 
graphics hardware. That, however, also means that it'll store as much 
graphics data as possible in the graphics memory, so that rendering is 
as smooth as possible (=> that's also why you'll find 512 MB and more 
on modern graphics cards compared to the 8 MB or 32 MB there used to 
be. Back then, the memory's main use was as a frame buffer, now a lot 
of textures need to be stored there as well).

Now, the higher the resolution you use, the more graphics memory will 
be needed and - especially with chipset graphics (where CPU and GPU 
share the same bus, but can't access concurrently, thus effectively 
slowing down one another) - the more data will need to be shuffled in 
and out of the graphics memory.

When increasing screen resolution and adding a second display, at some 
point you're guaranteed to hit a bottleneck (memory, bus or otherwise) 
and that's when you see performance degrading. It seems your system 
operates close to that bottleneck already and that when you start 
Remote Buddy, the small amount of graphics memory it needs finally 
pushes the integrated graphics of your system beyond its limits and 
the bottleneck is finally hit.

That's also why you'll see zero choppiness with a smaller EyeTV window 
(=> less graphics memory needed, less data shuffled across the bus) 
vs. a full-screen EyeTV window (=> more graphics memory is needed, 
more data is shuffled across the bus).

EyeTV will need more resources than VLC, because it needs to do a lot 
more. While VLC "just" plays back material that's "ready for display" 
right after decompression, EyeTV has to deal with tasks like 
deinterlacing (putting together the half frames it gets from the video 
signal), which means it needs to do some processing on the 
decompressed data prior to being able to display it - which is prone 
to need both more (video) memory and CPU power.

Possible solutions:

- reduce the resolution on your external or internal display (=> keep 
in mind that, unless you receive HDTV, standard PAL/NTSC video has a 
resolution of around 760 x 540)

- turn off any effects you may have configured in Remote Buddy 
Preferences > Menu > Appearance. These all use Core Image and thus 
indirectly put more load (when fading in/out) and possibly more 
resource use on your graphics system

- set a (small) desktop background image consisting of only one color. 
Texture compression on the GPU will make sure the amount of memory 
needed to store that background is minimal vs. a photo as a 
background, which will not nearly compress as much.

- try turning off deinterlacing in EyeTV (may or may not show effect - 
I write that under the assumption that this may save some graphics 
memory and traffic between CPU and the memory on the bus)

Best regards, 
Felix Schwarz 

User

27.06.2008 08:49:33
Re: EyeTV + Remote Buddy = choppy full screen
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This posting is older than 6 months and can contain outdated information.
Thankyou for your reply Felix.

I was unaware that RB used graphics memory even when it was not doing anything "graphical".

I did a bit of searching around and unfortunately there is no way of increasing the shared graphics memory of 64mb on a macbook. On PC's with integrated graphics chips, it is possible to increase how much system memory the PC allocates to the graphics. I have 2GB and would be very happy to allocate 128mb or 256mb to my graphics.

Lowering the resolution isn't really an option as I quite enjoy watching HDTV, around 50% of broadcasts that I do like watching are HDTV. Turning interlacing on / off is also cumbersome, and with interlacing off, it is really unwatchable.

I guess I'll just have to wait until Mac release a new mini with a better graphics chip, or one day update my macbook.

Thanks once again for your reply Felix.

PS, There is no way I can somehow force all graphical interface of RB off?