Pi2 using USB3 drive struggling to play MKV rips

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

So I just bought a raspberry pi 2 model B and loaded it up with raspbian and OSMC. It is on a Kingston 8GB class 10 MicroSD card. I have a 1 TB USB3 drive hooked up to the PI (had to add max_usb_current=1) to the config.txt to get that working. OSMC reads the hard drive fine and plays back the MKV rips, but it is terrible slow and stutters. These are >15GB rips from HDDVDs, mostly VC1, ripped with MakeMKV. Looking at the diagnostic display I see that one of the cores of the PI2 is always at 100% but the rest of them are not bad. I’ve already tried enabling the acceleration options with no effect.

Can the pi2/osmc combination just not handle the decoding of this size/quality of movie? Is there some setting I’m missing somewhere? Sorry for being a noob. I did try and search extensively for this particular problem but didn’t have any luck.

2

Did you buy the VC1 codec? If not then the Pi is not likely able to play your mkvs.

You may also consider using a powered USB hub, it will probably be more reliable (I assume that the USB drive is not self powered)

I have Bluray MKVs ripped using MakeMKV, and my Pi2 has no problems playing them.

3

There’s no chance of playing VC1 encoded HD content smoothly without buying and installing the VC1 codec license.

You can get that here:

4

I had seen the VC1 codec mentioned before but it was not clear if it was necessary. I will purchase and give that a whirl. Thanks guys/gals.

5

Well it is necessary if you want to play VC1 encoded videos. But as it seems you are encoding yourself you actually could also use a codec that the Pi can decode without a licence.
But getting the licence definitely will be the fastest step

6

I bought the decoders and everything works well. I guess I didn’t realize that this was necessary with the Pi. Thanks for the help.