[mythtv-users] Slow myth TV user interface on a fast machine

[Tom Metro]

Alex Halovanic wrote:
> You will have terrible performance with the free nv driver and the
> menus if they're being drawn with the default OpenGL painter as it's
> basically trying to emulate 3D hardware using only software. 

Confirmed, though the OpenGL setting only has a noticeable impact on the 
upper level menus, where it fades in/out the selections in what appears 
to be slow motion. Overall it makes the situation worse, but it doesn't 
make the menus that were slow before any slower.

The problem is specifically with the show selection menus and similar 
menus. Not the top-level menus or the recording group selection pop-up menu.


> Have you tried my suggestion of changing the 'Paint Engine' to QT in
> the Setup->Appearance menu and restarting the frontend?

As another person mention, I had always been using qt until I tried 
OpenGL for the first time today.


I've been suffering from this slow menu problem for like 6 months, but 
being on a combo BE/FE machine where the FE gets only occasional use for 
video editing, I hadn't been adequately motivated to research it. 
However, I had been surprised to see no mention of the problem on this 
list until just now, and wondered if it was a problem specific to my system.

My symptoms were pretty much as the OP described, and I also noticed 
that the problem would occasionally fix itself, but I never observed any 
correlation with any specific action - just that if the FE was left 
running for a long time (on the order of weeks) it would go away, and 
after restarting the FE (not the computer) it'd be back. I also noticed 
that this problem was introduced with some of the updates just prior to 
the Ubuntu Fiesty release (Feburary timeframe).


As others have reported, switching to the proprietary NVIDIA drivers 
fixed the problem. However, I did run into a glitch with the driver 
switch. I happened to have left the FE in OpenGL mode when I upgraded 
the driver, and when I tried running the FE again the prescaling screen 
was normal, but then the main menu screen appeared just as a black 
window (I run the FE windowed). Dragging the window caused a blue 
background to flicker into view, but no menus.

I probably could have flipped some setting in the DB to fix this, but 
Ubuntu makes the driver switch only a few clicks, so I reverted, 
switched back to Qt, and went back to the proprietary driver, where it 
worked fine.

Apparently the OpenGL implementation is broken in the proprietary driver 
with my hardware, which is an integrated video chip in the NVIDIA 
nForce2 chipset (lspci reports GeForce4 MX). Could be Ubuntu's 
Restricted Device Manager chose the wrong driver. (The howto mentions a 
legacy driver, but it installed the mainstream driver.)

  -Tom