Thank you wrxtasy, very much appreciated. I believe that you are the same guy from the KODI forums and I have read many of your previous posts regarding the deinterlacing performance of the AMLogic chips. I’m looking forward to purchasing a Wetek Core in the near future.
In my region, the OTA broadcasts are 720p and 1080i, for obvious reasons deinterlacing is only required on the 1080i streams. I believe MPEG-2 is the only codec allowed for OTA in North America.
I will check my current settings against your recommendations and see how things turn out. I am aware of an unofficial OE 6.0 build by chewitt which I may consider, to see if this offers any performance improvements.
It seems to be a tricky issue getting these devices to work well with MPEG-2 streams and deinterlacing. Point in case, some of the recent MPEG-2 issues on the Nvidia Shield with Jarvis, but you appear to be well aware of those.
CrystalHD decoding was removed from Kodi with the release of Kodi 14, but I have re-added it to Isengard and will be doing the same for Jarvis.
MPEG2 and VC1 never worked reliably with CrystalHD acceleration. Remember that CrystalHD is a black-box decoder. We upload firmware to it, and we DMA MPEG2/H264/VC1 in and we get frames out. I believe the reason VC1 and MPEG2 never worked properly was because we weren’t configuring the decoder properly. I’ll take a look in the New Year and see if there’s a quick way to get this working with CHD accelerated.
As @wrxtasy suggests, this is your best method for deinterlacing on the AppleTV. In the interim, until I get an opportunity to explore if it’s possible to get VC1 and MPEG2 working, I have made sure that this type of content is never sent to the CrystalHD decoder. In the past, you would get a black screen on some content and would have to manually disable hardware acceleration, which was very much a pain. Now, OSMC will only accelerate H264.
Indeed – AmLogic can do very good (adaptive) deinterlacing, which is one of the many reasons the OSMC Vero 2 is based on an AmLogic SoC.
Please let me know how you get on with that and if we can do anything to improve OSMC. We should have the hard disk installation coming very soon, which should help out those guys wanting to use their SSDs.
That’s correct – the aTV isn’t enumerating it quickly enough. Unfortunately, there’s not much that I can do to remedy that, but you should have more luck with a different USB stick. May I ask which USB stick you are using at the moment?
I ran the latest OE 6.0 unofficial created by chewitt and the same difficulties with 1080i MPEG-2 streaming and deinterlacing persist. I will say that OSMC seems to have better performance on 720p-1080p Blu-ray videos.
I have verified that my settings in the Video OSD are identical to wrxtasy suggestions. I may have to try the Crystalbuntu2/KODI instructions and see if things turn out a bit different.
I experimented with mpeg2 CHD Hardware decoding a while back and whilst it would decode there were a lot of jagged block artifacts in the resulting picture. VC1 I recall may have been a bit better.[quote=“slot47, post:142, topic:10029”]
It seems to be a tricky issue getting these devices to work well with MPEG-2 streams and deinterlacing. Point in case, some of the recent MPEG-2 issues on the Nvidia Shield with Jarvis, but you appear to be well aware of those.
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mpeg2 and .vob containers are causing a number of issues across various platforms. A few of us behind the scenes have given the Kodi dev. Koying some code ideas to work around this known problem. You will be happy to know this combo plays fine on the ATV1.
The other thing I will say is I’m running v4.0.7 of the TvHeadend server on an OE AMLogic device (C1) in the backend. This version fixes a lot of streaming problems. v2.1.18 is the TvHeadend client on the ATV1.
BTW. Crystalbuntu2 will be no different if you cannot get mpeg2 deinterlacing working out of OE6.0.0 / Kodi Isengard 15.2
Wrxtasy: I’m glad I didn’t spend any further time and effort trying to go back to CB2/KODI15, and I won’t be attempting this after your comments.
I can fire up a TvHeadend Server(4.0.7) on my Ubuntu box(14.04) and see if this changes the situation as it could be MythTV. I have noticed that KODI identifies my OTA live streams as 25 FPS, but the recordings are listed as 29.97. Here in the Great Green North, we are using NTSC, so that seems like a strange anomaly. Perhaps this is just a cosmetic error? I can always go one step further and configure ServerWMC on one of my Windows 7 boxes.
Just one final question: The additional CPU usage wouldn’t be related to the fact that 1080i OTA content is being distributed at a much higher bitrate than a typical DVD as it relates to the MPEG-2 codec?
Peace.
P.S. I think I might be getting something that thrills me to the CORE for Christmas!
Only experimenting at the moment with Kodi master on my S805 C1+, but the patch seems to work OK.
A higher spec 2GHz S8XX or S9XX would be better again to ffmpeg software decode mpeg2.
I was talking about AppleTV. If you check my CHD patch, you will see MPEG2 is already pushed in to SW. It seems Koying is just disabling HW accel for mpeg2 as I expected. I am doing the same on aTV but not via the Factory as Koying has done – as this is less platform independent, but rather at the DVDCodec implementation.
There are a few people now having issues with MythTV server / client and mpeg2 on the ATV1.
I’ve run TvHeadend server / client for years now, very few issues. The ATV1 will easily handle software decoding of 1080i mpeg2 streams. I’ve seen 14Mb/s HD stuff played without a problem with Bob deinterlacing.
Wrxtasy: I forgot how much fun it was to setup a TvHeadend server
Anyway, I couldn’t do a proper test without the EPG setup correctly, eh? Very similar performance, almost identical to be honest, with many dropped frames on live streams and recordings. I have ruled out any network issues(all wired gigabit) and any server issues, as the other clients with much beefier cpus/gpus are as smooth as silk. I don’t believe there would be any difference running OSMC as a HDD install rather than a USB install for this particular issue? Using my Nexus Player, the CPUs are under 50%, but the deinterlacing is not very good at all. I have other hardware options available to me for better performace. Many pieces of pi to go around during the holidays.
I’ve always wondered what it must be like to experience the holidays during the summer?
Have a great day! Peace.
