XBMCbuntu VM - Some questions

[suleimant]

Hi

 

So I have had my xbmcbuntu up and running smoothly for the past month with GPU and USB (for my FLIRC) passthrough. However I have some questions and suspect this would apply to any VM:

[*]Currently video playback lags when scraping for media info or rescanning folders. Is there anyway around this? I have 4 cpu's allocated with 3GB of RAM to the VM

[*]Currently my VM is running of my cache drive with is also used by sabnzbd and transmission to download files to. Do you think this could be impacting the item above and will replacing it with a SSD make a difference?

 

Thanks

[johnodon]

Wait...which version of XBMC?  Frodo or Gotham?

[suleimant]

Gotham.

[johnodon]

What vid card are you passing through?

[suleimant]

HD6450. I gave up on iGPU.

 

My setup is in one of the previous threads :

Mobo : ASRock Z87E-ITX

CPU : i7-4770T

RAM : 2 x Crucial 8GB DDR3-1600 (BLS8G3D1609ES2LX0)

PSU : Silverstone Tek Strider Series ATX12V/EPS12V 550W

Graphics Card: Radeon HD6450

[johnodon]

If you have successfully passed through a Radeon card in KVM to XBMCBuntu, you may have just become my new best friend. 

 

I'll get back to that after we work on your issue...

 

I would suspect that it is more a matter of disk I/O than anything.  Can you move the XBMCBuntu VM to another drive outside the array and test?

 

For CPU/MEM, I have gotten away with 2 cores and 2GB of RAM and never had any stutters (XBMCBuntu Frodo in an ESXi VM).  I had 3 of these running at one point with at least 5 other VMs performing various tasks.  My datastore was 3x 128GB SSDs.

 

As far as scraping, I rely on third party scrapers (Media Center Master, Media Companion, etc.) rather than XBMC itself.

 

 

[suleimant]

Thanks..

Will try an additional drive outside the VM this weekend and test (a bit lazy to drag out the spare drive from the garage this evening).

Thanks for the advice on the media scraper. I come from a plex background so XBMC is a bit of a shift....

 

 

 

[johnodon]

I prefer to save the metadata with the media files.  That way if/when I add another instance of XBMC the metadata is just sitting there (locally) waiting to be scraped.  This works especially well with using MySQL/MariaDB as a shared database and modifying the advancedsettings XML accordingly.

 

If you want to go that route and run into any snags, just ping me and I can give you a hand.

 

In the meantime you have a PM sitting in your inbox. 

 

John

[suleimant]

Thanks. Have dropped a response to your PM. I hope it helps. Will shout if the extra drive makes a difference to performance of the VM (And may borrow a friends SSD to see it that has an impact as well rather than running two drives..)