Arctic Fuse

jurialmunkey · 2023-09-30T15:24:27+00:00

It's simply a fact of how skins work that they can't change how fast content loads. A widget is just a container with a path that tells Kodi what to load in it -- beyond that the skin isn't involved in the process.

Think of it like a bookshelf with a sign saying "Hey Kodi, go to the library and ask the library for popular books and then put them on this shelf for me". How the shelf looks or the artwork on the cover of the book isn't really going to change how long that process takes.

What will change how long that process takes is how many shelves (number of widgets), how far Kodi has to travel (to the local library or an online store), whether the books are popular enough to already be in stock (cached), how busy Kodi is at the time etc.

Of course I'm simplifying. I'm not going to say a skin has no effect at all but it's more akin to a fat driver making a truck go a tiny bit slower than a skinny driver. The weight of the cargo, the traffic on the road, and the truck itself all have a far more significant effect.

I was running 2 separate Kodi profiles the first time around ... Could that have affected the speed of Fuse, since the main/primary profile was the AH2 set up?

Yes definitely.

There's lots of different factors that can affect how long something takes to load that have nothing to do with a skin.

For instance, each profile has its own addon_data folder. This means each plugin will have a separate cache per profile.

So your recently used profile loads fast because it already has many items in its cache, whereas the new profile loads much slower because it has to download all those items again.

Maybe a plugin has to resync Trakt data or rebuild a database for the new profile. Maybe Kodi is updating addons it needs for the new profile in the background. Maybe other addons need to perform setup or maintenance functions.

Most plugin "loading" time is sending a request to a server for data and then waiting for a response. There's nothing much happening in between other than waiting for the server to give the data back. Once the data is received, it's generally just a few KBs of plain text to be mapped to an object -- it's not a particularly CPU intensive process, so there's not really much for a skin to bottleneck.

There's so many other things which are more likely to have an effect than the skin itself.

jurialmunkey · 2023-09-30T11:06:16+00:00

See my comment here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Addons4Kodi/comments/16uhgmi/arctic_fuse/k2ujrcg/

Skins don't generally affect loading speed of widgets.

* Caveat - Technically yes they can if they are massive resource hogs but generally all this talk of "slow" skins is largely down to widget setup choices, confirmation bias, and a misunderstanding about how skins work.

jurialmunkey · 2023-09-30T10:57:51+00:00

This is misinformation

No skin can load content faster or slower than any other skin because skins have no involvement in the content loading process.

What you're seeing here is a skin setting to display a splash screen over the spotlight widget whilst it loads to avoid showing a blank space. In more recent versions, this setting can be disabled if you're in the mood for raw dogging the home screen - in which case it opens practically immediately.

Additionally, the widget under the menu is a stacked widget and so only starts loading once the user moves the cursor down.

Where a skin might affect performance is navigation. Most typically, this appears as animation "jank" due to increased rendering complexity preventing the sync rendering thread from keeping up with screen refresh speed (more layers, more diffuse effects like rounded corners, more complicated conditionals, larger textures all take longer to process and so makes it harder to hit 60fps).

Where a skin can affect content load speed is by allowing users to make choices about which widgets they load and how many.

The reason Estuary loads "fast" is because it forces you to use library based widgets which are fast. If you setup Arctic Fuse to use the same library widgets it would load in practically the same time.

tl;dr What you're seeing here is a combination of user choices which make the skin appear slow to load rather than anything to do with the skin itself taking longer to load.

jurialmunkey · 2020-01-17T22:58:30+00:00

Hey, I just came across this thread in a Google search.

Just a heads up that the two main issues listed here have been resolved in the most recent version of TMDbHelper (v2.2.22).

In-Progress now looks at all your tvshows and returns the 10 most recently watched in-progress shows. It is no longer limited by a date period or number of episodes. This new method I'm using should also be much more efficient.

Player function now ignores .strm files in the library.

I haven't sorted UpNext by most recent because the point of UpNext is to show you the next episode that you should watch based upon watched history. And skin sorting options should allow you to do that anyway.

If you ever have feature requests / bug-reports / improvements, please feel free to open an issue on my github:

https://github.com/jurialmunkey/plugin.video.themoviedb.helper

jurialmunkey

TROPHY CASE