Hello!
I am having a blast with the OSMC on my Raspberry Pi 3. However, I find the performance to be lacking in some respects, such as lags when navigating the menus, long opening times when opening folders so I have some ideas on what COULD increase the performance, but I would like to get some tips on what could have the greatest impact first:
Using 2.5A power source instead of 1A - I have used a fast 2.4A phone charger but I didn’t notice any improvement…
Class 10 SD card - I have class 4, is the upgrade worth it?
Installing OSMC to a flash drive and using the SD only for boot files only - could this improve performance? Could USB3.0 thumbdrive have an effect if Pi3 has only 2.0 ports?
Adding heatsinks and overclocking - the FAQ does not recommend it, but maybe it’s worth a try?
Buying codecs from raspberry Pi foundation - so far, I have only had issues with netflix 1080p h265 video, but setting the resolution to 720 fixed that. Could that speed up stuff apart from playback?
The recommended amps for the power supply is 2.5a not 1a, so this going to cause issues; a charger is not good either. You need a proper supply such as:
Class 10 has better read and write speeds, so you may see benefits in the UI.
Not convinced this make much difference to performance, running from a flash drive was a recommendation when SD cards had a higher failure rate.
Overclocking was an option for older pi models, not the pi3. Heatsink would be beneficial anyway:
Buying a license won’t fix the netflix issue, its a hardware limitation. Only needs liceneses of you intend to playback mpeg2 or vc1 content.
To sum up your issues stem from the 1a power supply.
SD card performance can have an impact on performance, but class 10 vs class 4 is unlikely to be very relevant, because the classes measure the sustained write speeds for large transfers. The performance with a Pi will depend more on the ability to be able to read and write small pieces of data from lots of different places all over the card, rather than one large piece all from the same place.
The OSMC guys do sell an SD card that is specifically selected for good performance with a Pi and a decent lifespan, so perhaps you could try that?
Of course not.
The Pi 3 has more than enough CPU power to decode standard definition MPEG-2 video (e.g. DVD remuxes) in software. If you need to decode MPEG-2 at higher resolutions then you’ll need to enable hardware MPEG-2 decoding - but high definition MPEG-2 is very rare. (You’ll find it very occasionally, for example on the blu ray of “Farscape: Peacekeeper Wars”).
VC-1 is a little more common; a lot of older blu ray disks, especially from the BBC, use VC-1; to play remuxes of those, you’ll need to enable hardware decoding for VC-1.
But this won’t affect anything except video playback; and if you need hardware decoding you’ll know about it: playback without it will be unbearably jerky. It won’t have any influence on navigating menus, and it won’t affect playback of h.264 (including Netflix).
Could you be more specific about exactly where these slowdowns are occuring. If your talking about in some add-on then likely there is nothing that can be done. If your talking about browsing your own local media are you talking about browsing files instead of using a Library? What exactly are you using for file storage?
So far, I have not connected any media folders. By folders I meant the “folders” in the netflix plugin. While that’s likely an issue with the plugin, i experience similar freezes when navigating the settings and menus.
I have a different power source now, so I will test whether the power source was to blame.
In Kodi’s UI? If you are seeing any delay at all navigating around Kodi’s with no media added to a library then you might want to plug a keyboard into your RPi and try navigating with that to see if the delay is with your system or a byproduct of what your controlling it with.
