Stuttering playback of 1080p MKV x264

Help and Support Vero 2
41

Do you see CalcDropRequierements in your Debug Log?

42

No, I did not.

I have passthrough enabled on the sample clip.

Iā€™ll try it with passthrough disabled tonight as well.

Sam

43

Audio Passthrough is enabled on my setup. See first post.
Or what did you mean?

44

Hi Sam

vero2-mediacenter-osmc_16.1.0-8 seems to have considerably improved things.

will do more testing but all my problematic files (john oliver etcā€¦) are behaving well.

thanks again for all your work on this.

45

Sam,
I did some testing with other movies. I even watched a (horrible) movie last night just to be sure Iā€™m not seeing things, my wife saw also the stuttering. WAF is very low again.

Meanwhile I have a RPi3 from a friend, installed latest vesion on it, exact same configuration (see my first post) and here all movies (even the clip Iā€™ve sent you from GoT) plays perfect, but really perfect! Smooth as silk, no CalcDropRequirements in my Debug log. Just perfect!!

So guessing now my Vero2 HW fails somehow? Because yours and all the others play just fine with your updates ā€¦ I really donā€™t know what to conclude else ā€¦

46

I donā€™t think your hardware has failed. I think youā€™d see more serious problems if that was the case.

  • Did you always experience this stuttering, or has it been a recent regression?
  • Can you run dpkg -l | grep mediacenter-osmc so I can see which build you are on?

Sam

47

I got my Vero2 now about 1 month now. I donā€™t think I saw any stuttering at the beginning. So Iā€™d say recent.

ii vero2-mediacenter-osmc 16.1.0-8 armhf Media Center package for OSMC

So the latest. Dunnow what to try more. Did a fresh install from 2016.05-1 and upgraded to the above version.
Whatā€™s confusing is that when I did a fresh install of 2016-04.1 I also saw the stuttering where before I didnā€™t realize seeing that stuttering before!
I really want those stutters to disappear and also those frequent CaclDropRequirements in the Debug log.

Whatā€™s frustrating also is that it works sublime on my RPi3 ā€¦ :rage:

48

Okay

Well if it worked perfectly before, we can make it work perfectly again. Itā€™s quite simple to trace regressions. The harder task is solving new problems.

Check out Download - OSMC ā€“ if an older version worked, then let me know. Does 2016.02-4 work well?

paste-log ~/.kodi/userdata/guisettings.xml would also be useful. Others seem to see improvement, so I want to hand-check your configuration to see why this isnā€™t the case for you.

Sam

49

My configuration:
http://paste.osmc.io/hinahinosu (@ActionA my overall settings in Kodi)

Iā€™ll try with a fresh 2016.02-4 install this weekend ā€¦ thanks for your positivism Sam :grin:

51

Hi Sam
Itā€™s still stuttering but less noticeable. Itā€™s especially noticeable on camera pans.
Hereā€™s the log:
http://paste.osmc.io/uxosudiwej
Media info:
General
Complete name : \NORTHBONDI\Multimedia$Video\TV\The Man In The High Castle\The.Man.In.The.High.Castle.S01E03.WEBRip.XviD-FUM.avi
Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
File size : 448 MiB
Duration : 57mn 13s
Overall bit rate : 1 096 Kbps
Writing library : VirtualDub build 35491/release

Video
ID : 0
Format : MPEG-4 Visual
Format profile : Advanced Simple@L5
Format settings, BVOP : 2
Format settings, QPel : No
Format settings, GMC : No warppoints
Format settings, Matrix : Default (H.263)
Muxing mode : Packed bitstream
Codec ID : XVID
Codec ID/Hint : XviD
Duration : 57mn 13s
Bit rate : 958 Kbps
Width : 624 pixels
Height : 352 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate : 23.976 (24000/1001) fps
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Compression mode : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.182
Stream size : 392 MiB (87%)
Writing library : XviD 65

Audio
ID : 1
Format : MPEG Audio
Format version : Version 1
Format profile : Layer 3
Mode : Joint stereo
Mode extension : MS Stereo
Codec ID : 55
Codec ID/Hint : MP3
Duration : 57mn 13s
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 128 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 52.4 MiB (12%)
Alignment : Split accross interleaves
Interleave, duration : 42 ms (1.00 video frame)
Interleave, preload duration : 500 ms

And hereā€™s a clip. Itā€™s shows up best at around 30sec in:

52

I cannot play this clip in VLC on my PC.

Is this a video recording of your Vero experiencing the problem, or is it a sample of the problematic clip? Have you tried playing back this clip and verifying it works?

53

It should be okay now. Itā€™s an mp4 recording from my phone of the screen.

54

Hereā€™s a new link:

55

A video of you showing the behavior is not what we need. We need a sample piece of that video (100mb or so) that experiences the issue that we can use to test with.

56

No problem. Here you go:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13962661/The.Man.In.The.High.Castle.S01E02.WEBRip.XviD-FUM.avi

57

Iā€™m getting a very similar issue on my vero 2, plays well for around 3-5 seconds then itā€™s lots and lots of frame drops and itā€™s unwatchable.

Media info: http://paste.osmc.io/osakuqitog.vhdl

Had a very similar issue previously but it got patched. I can confirm this issue occurs even on the earlier versions of osmc, however other media players have no issue with the file.

58

I think someone also reported this exact episode of John Oliver.

Frame rate                               : 59.880 fps
Original frame rate                      : 59.940 fps

May be the problem. I will see if I can source the file and see whatā€™s going on

59

Thanks for the quick response. Donā€™t know if this is any help, selecting the option ā€œsync playback to displayā€ stops osmc reporting skipped frames but itā€™s still the same sketchy playback.

60

Do you have ā€œadjust display refresh rate to match videoā€ enabled ? If not, try turning that on.

61

Yes, by default it is enabled but Iā€™ve tried with it on and off and no difference.