"Continue Watching" extreme slowness - CPU, cache, or setting?

Help and Support Vero V
1

Vero V / 2026.05-01
Embuary Skin
Emby for Kodi Next Gen Plugin

One of my favorite unique aspects of the Embuary skin is the widgets showing relevant and timely info such as “Continue Watching” and “Next Up” and “Latest Shows” and the like. These work via a multi-step process. The Embuary Helper reaches out to the Emby API for the list of videos for the widget and gets it in JSON or XML format. It then shows a spinning wheel while it gets all of the thumbnails for the movies/shows before finally showing the full list.

Generating these lists takes a very notable amount of time on my new Vero V – five or more seconds.

This is an eternity compared to my original and now ancient Kodi HTPC running on a dual-core 2014 Intel i3 and 7200 RPM spinning drives. Most of those lists populate essentially instantly and, at most, I might see a spinning wheel for some fraction of a second. The difference between the decade plus system and new Vero V is very stark in this case and not in the direction I’d expect.

The skin, plugins, Emby, and physical switch configuration (latency) is exactly the same between the two Kodi instances.

Comparing the drives (for cache), I’d expect the internal emmc to be much faster than my older hard drives.

The 2014 i3 is only dual core compared to the Amlogic’s quad core design (but this might be mostly single threaded) but does have almost double the max CPU speed. Both seem to hover around 1Ghz when I watch them, though. And if it’s just the CPU speed difference, then I’d expect it to be maybe twice as slow, not many many times slower.

What I’m hoping for is a either the knowledge that the Amlogic chip is so hyper focused on playing media that it’s general CPU work is many times slower than even a decade old entry-level Intel CPU OR that there is some hidden setting that I should be looking that is directly affecting this.

Thoughts?

2

that’s not an entirely reasonable expectation
eMMC is HS200 or HS400, 200 transfers at 200MB/s, 400 at 400MBs
a standard magnetic drive can be from 160MB/s to 250MB/s

while i don’t have a data sheet for Vero to say which HS it’s using, even at the higher rate it’s barely twice as fast

besides that a direct comparison of benmarks between S905X4 and i3-4100 the i3 tests way higher

(estimated i3 4100 since that’s what was available in 2014)

your experience to me looks like a normal one, Amlogic is a low power device

3

Ah, thank you. My normal CPU comparison sites did not include the Amlogic chips so I didn’t know I could compare them. It turns out that the comparison is even more extreme than you show since my original system has the desktop i3-4160 chip… which is much faster than the mobile i3-4100M chip.

Turns out the older i3-4160 is still at least 5x faster in most of the benchmarks and up to 20X faster in raw floating point (GFLOPS). :exploding_head:

I think Apple has warped my expectations of low power ARM chips and now I just assume they are much lower power while still being just as if not much faster. Time to get back to reality!

I’ll just remind myself that I specifically wanted a lower powered Kodi box and one that can transparently play even the most demanding media. Last night I played a 4K video “accidentally” in that I didn’t know it even was 4K until I was done watching it… that would have been impossible with my i3-based Kodi but the Vero handled it so transparently that I didn’t even know. Sweet.