Playback issues starting with OSMC

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

Greetings, all. I have be running OSMC on a RaspPi 2 for a little under two years now, and it has worked almost flawlessly in that time. With the most recent version update, including the updated UI and I believe Kodi Krypton, I have some mp4 files that now stutter on playback.

I have uploaded a Kodi logfile (link below) taken with two of the now-troublesome files and one larger, higher-bitrate file that plays perfectly. This is a hardwired RPi2 box (no wifi) and these two troublesome files play back normally on other clients, such as VLC from a wifi-based PC (no stuttering or frame drops). As is evident in the logs, the first two (BadExample1.mp4 and BadExample2.mp4) show consistent drops, while the higher-bitrate file (GoodExample1.mp4) render without difficulty.

I would appreciate any thoughts on why this might be happening; it surely seems as though this has some relationship to the most recent version update to OSMC. I am presently running OSMC March 2017 (2017.03-1).

Kodi.log

EDIT:

  • I also have a Raspberry Pi 3 unit with OSMC (same version) that exhibits identical behavior on the same mp4 files.

  • I note that both of the “BadExample” files in the posted log are h264 files, while the other (non-stuttering) version is avc1; however, I sampled another h264 file on the box and it’s playback is perfect.

EDIT 2:

  • Further investigation shows that these problematic files exhibit the same stutter symptoms when played on a non-OSMC version of KODI Krypton on Android. In contrast, the “GoodExample” file shown here plays flawlessly on that same KODI install, which is connected via wi-fi. As a matter of verification of info I had posted previously, I again played these problematic files on VLC over a Windows 7 laptop connected via wi-fi, and they played perfectly.

EDIT 3 - Solution

Per my last reply below, enabling OMX Hardware Acceleration seems to have solved this issue.

2

Can you provide mediainfo output for the problematic files?

3

Will do asap.

4

Here are the mediainfo outputs for the two problematic files:

Bad Example1 mediainfo: BadExample1 - mediainfo - Pastebin.com
Bad Example2 mediainfo: BadExample2 - mediainfo - Pastebin.com

5

I believe I have solved this issue.

In researching generic KODI stutter issues, I discovered that sometimes toggling hardware acceleration can affect this behavior. When I went into system settings for video I found that OMX hardware acceleration was turned off on both OSMC boxes with this problem. I turned this setting on, restarted, and both files now play flawessly.

6

OMX is best avoided on Pi2/3, and shouldn’t be necessary

Video is still accelerated in hardware.

7

What would you suggest as an alternative solution, then? There is clearly a difference in the file rendering with omx enabled, so I’m not sure how I can avoid it. What’s the actual problem that makes it something to be avoided?