Since the Pi 2 has more CPU power, I decided to try out some different skins, and have run into an odd one with the BackRow skin.
With Video Acceleration set to the default to use DVDPlayer, some videos will not play, I just hear audio. However, with the other skins I’ve used (OSMC, Confluence, Transparency!) the same videos play fine with DVDPlayer. If I switch to use OMXPlayer, then the videos play fine with BackRow.
On my Linux Mint laptop, with Kodi and the BackRow skin, the videos also play fine. (No option to select DVDplayer or OMXplayer of course)
If there is interest in finding out what’s going on, I will test some more, and post a log.
I’m going to try out a few more skins also, and will report if I see the same problem with other skins.
BTW, here’s the mediainfo for one of the files that would not play with BackRow/DVDPlayer:
General
Complete name : Doctor Who Classic - 09x05 - The Curse of Peladon (Episode 1) (SILVER).avi
Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
File size : 113 MiB
Duration : 24mn 32s
Overall bit rate mode : Variable
Overall bit rate : 642 Kbps
Writing application : MEncoder Sherpya-SVN-r27811-4.2.5
Writing library : MPlayer
Video
ID : 0
Format : MPEG-4 Visual
Format profile : Simple@L3
Format settings, BVOP : No
Format settings, QPel : No
Format settings, GMC : No warppoints
Format settings, Matrix : Default (H.263)
Codec ID : XVID
Codec ID/Hint : XviD
Duration : 24mn 32s
Bit rate : 512 Kbps
Width : 480 pixels
Height : 320 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 4:3
Original display aspect ratio : 3:2
Frame rate : 25.000 fps
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Compression mode : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.133
Stream size : 89.9 MiB (80%)
Writing library : XviD 1.1.2 (UTC 2006-11-01)
Audio
ID : 1
Format : MPEG Audio
Format version : Version 1
Format profile : Layer 3
Mode : Joint stereo
Mode extension : MS Stereo
Codec ID : 55
Codec ID/Hint : MP3
Duration : 24mn 32s
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 120 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 32.0 KHz
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 21.1 MiB (19%)
Alignment : Aligned on interleaves
Interleave, duration : 36 ms (0.90 video frame)
Interleave, preload duration : 134 ms
Writing library : LAME3.98
Video not playing or playing with a black screen is usually caused by running out of GPU memory, but if that’s the case here that’s a very greedy skin indeed as the default GPU allocation on the Pi 2 is 256MB which is normally enough even for “heavy” skins.
You can monitor the free GPU memory in realtime over ssh using bcmstat.
Install that then launch it like this:
./bcmstat cgx
Then try to play your video and watch the free GPU memory. If it drops below about 30-40MB that’s probably the issue, and increasing the GPU memory allocation will probably help. Try 384MB and see if that fixes it then try backing the amount off. A reboot is needed for the new config.txt setting to take effect.
Thanks for the suggestion. Of course, after loading bcmstat (useful tool BTW) I can’t reproduce the problem 
Time ARM Core H264 Core Temp (Max) IRQ/s RX B/s TX B/s %user %nice %sys %idle %iowt %irq %s/irq %total GPUMem Free Memory Free/Used
======== ======= ======= ======= =============== ====== ========== ========== ====== ====== ====== ====== ====== ====== ====== ====== =========== ================
21:26:20 600Mhz 250Mhz 250Mhz 51.92C (55.15C) 1,284 1,201,188 41,472 12.63 2.11 2.57 69.25 9.36 0.00 2.69 30.75 140M ( 59%) 439,536 kB/41.5%
21:26:22 600Mhz 250Mhz 250Mhz 51.92C (55.15C) 1,533 1,706,497 49,093 6.65 0.48 4.28 84.36 0.12 0.00 3.56 15.64 140M ( 59%) 439,920 kB/41.4%
21:26:24 600Mhz 250Mhz 250Mhz 50.84C (55.15C) 259 229 243 4.31 0.60 4.07 90.68 0.00 0.00 0.00 9.32 140M ( 59%) 440,372 kB/41.4%
21:26:26 600Mhz 250Mhz 250Mhz 50.84C (55.15C) 260 49 394 5.26 0.48 3.59 90.84 0.00 0.00 0.12 9.16 145M ( 61%) 439,972 kB/41.4%
That’s the snapshot from when I started the video (same file that was failing yesterday)
Oh well, I’ll report back if I see the problem again.