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View Full Version : Why is "grid view" so slow..?

smashtheqube
11-04-2006, 05:18 PM
It's like painful to use....
phototrek
11-04-2006, 05:25 PM
Everything is slow on mine. The list of shows in Now Playing takes several seconds to load. My Series-1 can run circles around this new one.
bkdtv
11-04-2006, 05:25 PM
Why is "grid view" so slow..?Because Tivo didn't use Broadcom's 2006 BCM7400 (http://www.broadcom.com/products/Consumer-Electronics/High-Definition-Audio-Video-Graphics-System-Processors/BCM7400) chip with superior cpu, graphics, memory I/O, and disk I/O performance, and elected instead to base their design around a chip designed in 2002-2003 and released in late 2004. This chip was never intended to support all the "media center" and 'net integration features offered by Tivo.

Tivo just released the "Fall 2006 Service Release" beta update for the Series2, which is claimed to improve performance and responsiveness. Once that's done, some of the code changes should carry over to the Series3. I doubt the Series3 will ever be as fast or as responsive as we would like, given Tivo's decisions on the design, but it could get a significant boost in upcoming software releases.
smashtheqube
11-05-2006, 12:07 PM
Okay, my fingers are crossed. I don't understand why displaying the friggin GRID should be requiring so much power....
rodalpho
11-05-2006, 12:39 PM
Because Tivo didn't use Broadcom's 2006
Dude I know you're bummed out that they didn't use the newest silicon available, but you can't blame everything on that. The s3 UI is slow because it's badly coded. My old series1 had a lightning fast UI and it only had 16MB of RAM with a 54Mhz CPU. My cellphone is like 50 times faster.
missiontortilla
11-05-2006, 01:00 PM
Apparently TiVo is following the programming model:

Step 1. Make it work
Step 2. Make it work quickly
zackangelo
11-14-2006, 10:19 AM
Make it work? It's been "working" for seven or eight years. Seems like they would've moved on to step two by now.
bown
11-14-2006, 10:25 AM
Or at least fake it. Pre-cache one page down, one page up, and one page right. That way when you hit the button, the change is instant and while you are reading the grid, it can pre-cache the next pages. Just a thought...
ashu
11-14-2006, 12:55 PM
Or at least fake it. Pre-cache one page down, one page up, and one page right. That way when you hit the button, the change is instant and while you are reading the grid, it can pre-cache the next pages. Just a thought...

I believe caching is already done! Its the rendering of the filled pixels for this kind of guide that is the bottleneck.
JohnBrowning
11-14-2006, 03:40 PM
Dude I know you're bummed out that they didn't use the newest silicon available, but you can't blame everything on that. The s3 UI is slow because it's badly coded. My old series1 had a lightning fast UI and it only had 16MB of RAM with a 54Mhz CPU. My cellphone is like 50 times faster.


How could you possibly know that? Did you write it? There are many reasons why the UI is slower than you'd like. Perhaps it is the priority assigned to the task. I always laugh when someone makes a definitive statement about something which they likely have no intimate knowledge.
DTap
11-14-2006, 04:45 PM
Okay, my fingers are crossed. I don't understand why displaying the friggin GRID should be requiring so much power....

If you have a bunch of channels that you never watch and never plan to watch, take them out of the lineup. I took out about 60% of the stuff I don't subscribe to with cable or stuff that I never watch (like I see no need to have the high def and standard def affiliates) and the grid sped up easily 40%.
timdorr
11-15-2006, 09:38 AM
Dude I know you're bummed out that they didn't use the newest silicon available, but you can't blame everything on that. The s3 UI is slow because it's badly coded. My old series1 had a lightning fast UI and it only had 16MB of RAM with a 54Mhz CPU. My cellphone is like 50 times faster.

100% correct.

Reboot your Tivo and try out the guide and menus. You'll find it's all quick. Really quick. It kind of makes you wonder what slows it down so much later on. But it's definitely capable of showing the menus and guide data really fast. I just wish it stayed that way...
Jiffylush
11-15-2006, 09:54 AM
But if we reboot we have to wait for all the channels to come back, I would rather just deal with it and wait for a patch.

Maybe it would be good to reboot before bed or something?
gr0m1t
11-15-2006, 10:43 AM
i don't use the grid view all the time, but the dozen or so times i've used it since i got my s3, i've not seen any slowness.

am i just lucky or is it because i don't use it a lot?
rodalpho
11-15-2006, 05:37 PM
How could you possibly know that? Did you write it? There are many reasons why the UI is slower than you'd like. Perhaps it is the priority assigned to the task. I always laugh when someone makes a definitive statement about something which they likely have no intimate knowledge.
So you really think that the S3 has such an incredibly slow UI because it's a difficult problem to fix? I guess you envision teams of bespeckled engineers in white coats pacing around their top secret labs, scribbling equations on the whiteboards, feverishly working nights drinking gallons of bitter coffee, all just to crack this very tough nut?

Why is the s3 so slow? Well, I choose to apply occam's razor.
smashtheqube
11-16-2006, 02:09 PM
It seems like Grid view is dramatically faster now, still far from what I expect but it's better at least.
Brad Smith
11-16-2006, 02:31 PM
It's not just the grid view that is slow, though. The TiVo live view can be painfully slow scrolling and especially loading in the shows as you scroll from page to page. It's been one of the major shocks to me coming from a SA 8300HD with Passport... TiVo is about 1/3 to 1/4 the speed of the SA box when it comes to browsing the guide or doing anything in the menus.