RealMagic Remote - CTInfra driver (I think) - SLOOOW - help?

[Ron]

Welcome to the Girder forums.

Donation system, take a look at the front page of the girder homepage, there is a button "donate" at the bottom. :-)

Strange that it is slow. I would not expect that. Since the CTInfra driver is not a polling driver it should work okay. Did you check if there are any other program/drivers running ?

[Ron]

Well Girder 3.1 is faster in processing (not loading), Girder 3.2 has a vastly improved message queue. And the CTInfra driver merged with the UIR driver in Girder 3.1.

Sorry can't be of real help here.

[Ron]

Girder 3.2 is still alpha ;-) so be carefull :-) Testers are always welcome though!!

[Mark F]

Since the orginal poster stated that NOTHING else is running on this platform but Girder, how would increasing Girder's priority help? It is not competing for time with anything. This slow response is NOT explained by normal priority.

An old proverb, "Just because you have a hammer doesn't mean everything is a nail."

If you are running a media type application and it is leaving no time for Girder, do you want the media app to skip when Girder decides to do something? Changing the priority of Girder WILL do that. See the FAQ section about the IGOR plugin. You are asking for Girder to cause skipping by itself.

Increasing the priority of this applicaiton is a BAD idea.

[Mark F]

I'm just a plugin developer and user. You have not annoyed me. You are presenting the other side of a discussion. :)


This is not a fact. Media app usually have it`s own buffer, and skipping for a short time (!girder needs a rather short time to handle a single event!) will not produce any noticable defects on media stream.
From this (http://www.girder.nl/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1368) thread:
"Just to inform u : with older version of the driver, when i used to press a key, all my OS used to seems to freeze because of very hight CPU using. But because we press the buton a very short time, it was not a problem (expect that i had to do not use remote while burning a CD ."

From this (http://www.girder.nl/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1073) thread:
"I'm using Girder with the Igor plug. I notice that when pressing ANY key on my universal remote that it will interrupt my currently playing dvd/mp3 for a second or two. This is really annoying and pretty much makes this IR receiver useless for me"

From this (http://www.girder.nl/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=795) thread:
"As the topic says, every time I press the remote to send commands to Media Juke Box 7.2, I get small hickups in sound. It's annoying, especially when I'm using the remote as a mouse, surfing for tunes. Is there an easy explanation for this? I use the Igor Plug-in"

The IGOR plugin allows users to change it's priority. When set too high, it causes obvious disruptions in other activities. Girder commands can be long and can include waits, loops and other activity that is not deterministic. It can take a long time for a single event to get through all the command processing.


I also use dscaler - it leaves too little cpu time for girder. So, when girder is running at normal priority, response on keypresses on my remote control are too slow, and sometimes it even becomes be angry.
Have you reported this CPU hogging on the DScaler support forums? There is a solution. Their BT driver needs to be interrupt driven and their processing thread needs to block on a semaphore rather than polling the hardware. The DScaler team chose to ignore this suggestion in the past. Maybe you will have better luck convincing them.


IMHO it`ll be better if it will be a user-configurable choice.
Since you were able to do this, it sounds like it IS a user configurable choice. ;)

I would not hand a sharp knife to a child and I would not hand this sharp knife to an unsuspecting user.

I believe we must agree to disagree. :)

[Mark F]

This plugin is included in the standard distribution. To enable it, look under the file menu for settings. Then press the plugin tab and scroll to the bottom of the list. Make sure the check box next to the "UIR/IRMAN/IRA/CTINFRA/Hollywod+ plugin" is checked and press apply. Make sure the plugin is highlighted and press settings. Choose the Creative Infra RS232 from the hardware dropdown and choose the correct com port. Press apply again and you should be done.

[onesteve]

Hi all,

:-?
yep, I have a problem. First of all though, thanks heaps and congrats to Ron - great little app (and website) you've made. Any donation system?

Now - I have the Realmagic remote, and have been happily using it with the CTInfra driver for a while. However, I'm now trying to use this on an older computer (Pentium 200 MMX) and it is SLOOOOOW - even with no other apps running. About a second worth of lag. This thing can run Quake well enough, so I would assume it could decode the infra red signal and do whatever the beautiful little thing does. My first thought is that it could be that the driver is slow, based on an assumption that the driver is integral to the decoding work, and that I haven't heard of anyone else whinging about slow response. Oh, and also, response using the plain old keyboard is just fine.

Any thoughts or help would be absolutely great. I need my jukebox back!!!

Thanks heaps everyone

steve

[onesteve]

I'm using version 3.0.23

Thanks!

[onesteve]

Thanks for your reply Ron.

donation button - d'oh! damn thing tucked away down there :wink:

Yeah, I've used it with just an explorer window open, as well as with Winamp open. There doesn't even seem to be a difference in response times whether Winamp is open and playing or not. I suppose "slow" is all relative to the computer speed, but it can do other (somewhat) complex tasks, like running Quake or Rebirth 2.0.

Is there a newer version of this driver? I haven't had much luck finding one. Are there any fixes in Girder since version 3.0.23 that may be relevant?

Thanks again :D

steve

[onesteve]

Thanks Ron. I'll install 3.2 and see how that goes. :o

[onesteve]

yeah, I was gonna come back and replace that with 3.1 :wink:

[Corpse]

RonB
I suppose this problem is caused by the same thing I said about yestarday. Slow response is well explained by the fact of normal priority. This just did not show on faster machine because it gave much cpu time for girder. Running winamp, for example, uses high priority for mp3 decoder, and this doesn`t leave enough cpu time for girder.
IMHO priority option must have a place in settings dialog.

[Corpse]

Since the orginal poster stated that NOTHING else is running on this platform but Girder, how would increasing Girder's priority help?

Ok, if nothing is running, girder must not show slow response. You may be right, but why the original poster not to try to increase priority manually. What if it`ll work well?


If you are running a media type application and it is leaving no time for Girder, do you want the media app to skip when Girder decides to do something? Changing the priority of Girder WILL do that.

This is not a fact. Media app usually have it`s own buffer, and skipping for a short time (!girder needs a rather short time to handle a single event!) will not produce any noticable defects on media stream. I`ve tried this myself - winamp works fine. I also use dscaler - it leaves too little cpu time for girder. So, when girder is running at normal priority, response on keypresses on my remote control are too slow, and sometimes it even makes me angry. I need express to decrease volume or press pause, but response runs up to several seconds. I tried to set priority to high (in task manager), and was nicely surprised - the response became immediate. Yes, dscaler lost some frames when osd appeared, but it`s very insignificant to me.


Increasing the priority of this applicaiton is a BAD idea.

It is not a bad idea, it is a thing, that depends on user needs, and so IMHO it`ll be better if it will be a user-configurable choice.

p.s.
I don`t want to present myself annoying to the developers. I really respect thier hard and useful work. The program is really great and worth praising!
I just wanted to give some useful suggestion, but it seems that I did it not in a good manner... I`m sorry for that...
If you consider this option useless, or hard to implement, I shall no later bore you about this.

[wcollins]

I'm trying to get my Sigma RealMagic Remote to work with Girder and I understand a CTInfra Driver works with the included IR Receiver. Where can I get this driver? I did a search for it but all I found was a Creative Labs CDROM Drive Driver.