Stutter on video files

Help and Support Vero V
1

Hi,

Noticed stutter when playing a varierty of content, both TV and films so doesn’t seem related to frame rate. It seems more pronounced than the micro stutter that I experienced on the 4k+ for a time, lasting for maybe 1/2 a second

I do have whitelist set up. Same playing content from different drives, also.

Logs here: pending
I creates logs a lot faster on the V :smiley:

Thanks

2

Does that log set even contain you reproducing the issue? I wasn’t seeing any playback there and you seem to have a number of locations you play content from. Does local playback have this issue or only UPnP, Onedrive, an add-on, something else?

3

Sorry, a bit too eager there :slight_smile: Let me repost tomorrow after viewing tonight.
All local playback, yep.

4

Took a few days for it to start stuttering again but now logs are too big to upload. Any idea how I can get around that?

5

The support request guide outlines how to save the logs to disk so you can edit them and then how to upload after. Use that to take enough of the unimportant time period out so they are small enough to upload.

6

Thanks but where does the log get saved to on disk?

7

/boot/uploadlog.txt

It actually tells you that it saves it there when you do a grab-logs -A -C

8

Thanks for that. Deleted a lot of the log detailing library scans. The issue occured on 02.11 , from about 7pm onwards with a few stutters in video playback.

Cheers

9 
====================== Memory =================== eWTP1Mc8
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            3763        1554         159          49        2049        1909
Swap:              0           0           0

---------------------- Memory END --------------- eWTP1Mc8

I think you are running something with a memory leak.

1 Like
10

Hmmm. I did notice memory usage creep up after a few weeks from 40 to 55 percent. Checking when 4k stuff is playing, kodi says its only using 65 percent, if that is accurate.

I’m only running docker and noip. I can see docker memory use is fairly consistent.

Nothing in the logs to suggest where the leak is from?

Thanks

11

Here’s a snapshot of memory use when playing a file, if it’s any help.

Screenshot 2023-11-03 180436
Screenshot 2023-11-03 180436922×558 23.3 KB

12

TBH I stopped looking as soon as I spotted you were low on memory as that is going to cause playback issues even though the playback itself isn’t the problem. The playback with the Vero’s default large cache settings is going to take up a chunk of memory and make the issue show up, but the issue is that something else is taking up more RAM than it should. You said it took a few days before you saw an issue. Just take a note of what memory is used on a fresh restart and then after a day or two to see what is growing. If it is Kodi and restarting it frees up the memory then you need to start looking at add-ons you’ve installed.

13

There is normally at least a gb and a half free when I’m playing a fairly demanding video so unless kodi inaccurately reports memory, I don’t understand why this would be the root of the issue.

Memory usage does climb incrementally but I have never seen an oom as reported by Kodi, anyway.
I’ve got very few add ons and just docker installed really.

Some further guidance would be appreciated.

14

You could try disabling Docker for a while and seeing if this helps.
Do any of your Docker containers use services like Redis which can be somewhat runaway with memory usage?

Sam

15

No redis, just sab, sonarr, radarr, bazarr & portainer:

image
image883×128 5.99 KB

16

I would watch for memory leaks over time.

17

Just limit memory and cpu usage of each container.

In portainer you can easily do that by recreating the container and going into the runtime & ressources section and set max memory and cpu usage.

You can also limit the the whole docker setup with memory slice

Create a file to /etc/systemd/system/docker_limit.slice

[Unit]
Description=Slice that limits docker resources
Before=slices.target

[Slice]
CPUAccounting=true
CPUQuota=200% <-- cpu limit (each core is 100%, limit to 2 to keep the rest available to kodi) 
#Memory Management
MemoryAccounting=true
MemoryLimit=2G  <-- mem limit, keep 1.5g for kodi

Start unit: systemctl start docker_limit.slice

Edit /etc/docker/daemon.json

{
  "cgroup-parent": "docker_limit.slice"
}

Restart Docker daemon: systemctl restart docker

Personnaly i would move all that stuff to a RPI or desktop machine with a stronger CPU.
The Vero CPU is not that powerful and can get easily overload with the parsing done by the *arr software.
Also yo can easily replace the *arr with flexget that can handle all that stuff.
Have a look at : [HowTo] Flexget, "the lazy couch" fully automated watching experience

2 Likes
18

Thanks for the info but I’m not seeing out of memory errors. When playing, I tend to have at least 40% ram available.( I did check out flex get but it didn’t look particularly intuitive.)

Unless, as I did ask a few posts back, whether kodi reports ram usage inaccurately.

If not, what else can be causing the issue?

19

Well, you said you don’t tend to have an issue until the system has been up for a number of days, correct? When it starts to have an issue and you ssh in what does CPU and RAM usage look like when it is actively playing poorly? This doesn’t occur with just certain types of files and if you reboot after the problem shows up the same file plays without issue, yes?

20

Yes, it occurs randomly overtime. CPu usage is very minimal and RAM I have mentioned.

The 4k+ managed a similar set up, minus using docker, and I did not have these playback hiccups. This has twice the ram so I’d be surprised if that was the culprit.