Hmm, that’s helpful to know – thanks for the tip. I don’t have intuition enough to pinpoint it myself. Any packages in particular that you suspect and that I could try reinstalling?
I think I need to hold off on experimenting with clean installs until I get some new SD cards.
As an aside even standard definition MPEG4 goes out of sync with audio within a few minutes whenever HW decoding is active during playback (it doesn’t jump forward though, so not as serious a problem). Meanwhile SW decoding gives flawless performance for the same file:
Media Info
Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
Format settings : BitmapInfoHeader / WaveFormatEx
File size : 300 MiB
Duration : 28 min 40 s
Overall bit rate mode : Variable
Overall bit rate : 1 463 kb/s
Frame rate : 25.000 FPS
Director : TSV Productions
Video
ID : 0
Format : MPEG-4 Visual
Format profile : Advanced Simple@L5
Format settings : BVOP1 / Custom Matrix
Format settings, BVOP : 1
Format settings, QPel : No
Format settings, GMC : No warppoints
Format settings, Matrix : Custom
Codec ID : XVID
Codec ID/Hint : XviD
Duration : 28 min 40 s
Bit rate : 1 188 kb/s
Width : 576 pixels
Height : 432 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 4:3
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) : 0.191
Stream size : 244 MiB (81%)
Writing library : XviD 1.0.2 (2004-08-29)
Audio #1
ID : 1
Format : MPEG Audio
Format version : Version 1
Format profile : Layer 3
Format settings : Joint stereo / MS Stereo
Codec ID : 55
Codec ID/Hint : MP3
Duration : 28 min 40 s
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 128 kb/s
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 48.0 kHz
Frame rate : 41.667 FPS (1152 SPF)
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 25.6 MiB (9%)
Alignment : Aligned on interleaves
Interleave, duration : 24 ms (0.60 video frame)
Interleave, preload duration : 510 ms
Writing library : LAME3.90.
Encoding settings : -m j -V 4 -q 2 -lowpass 17.6 --abr 128
Language : English
I’m not versed in audio+video decoding so maybe this particular combination of codings (MPEG-4 + MP3?) is easily enough dismissed as problematic in and of itself, and/or isn’t related to the problem at hand. It’s just that the two problems seem to have coincided, and both seem to relate to “PRIME DRM”.