Troubles playing 1080p HEVC video on Rpi 3B

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

First off, here’s the logs:
Log

My 3B is really struggling to play this mkv of Mad Max: Fury Road from a USB HD running off the pi. I’ll get stuttering and the audio will drop out during some sections. I’ve been monitoring the temperature via vcgencmd measure_temp and it’s high, but maxing out somewhere around 74-75C. I’m using aluminum heat sinks on the CPU and GPU, and a copper sink on the RAM, plus an iUniker case with the fan on high

Are there any settings that I can tweak to get more stable performance? I tried a mild overclock, but that made things more unstable.

Thanks!

2

I would Re-encode the video as the RPI 3B lacks hardware acceleration for hevc videos that Vero 4k+ has this feature as part of its product, reason why you suffering as the rpi is software rendering the video which is very heavy work resulting in it generating a lot of heat resulting in the device downclocking its cpu to reduce the heat which results in the stuttering you have noticed

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3

Ah, thanks for the tip! What codecs does the 3B support for hardware acceleration?

4

It support H264 8bit depth just avoid the 10bit depth as there is no hardware acceleration for it either.

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5

H.264 by default. It can be quite cheaply upgraded to support MPEG-2 and VC-1 in hardware, but I think most people don’t bother: it’s powerful enough to decode standard definition MPEG-2 in software, and HD resolution MPEG-2 is fairly rare. There are some older blu rays that use VC-1.

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6

Ah, I accidentally encoded with 10 bit depth. I’ll stick with H.264 8 bit from now on. Thanks!

7

One last question. Can I use x264 instead of h264?

8

That question doesn’t really make sense. x.264 is a programme designed to encode videos in h.264 format.

9

Ah, revealing my ignorance. Just trying to figure out all the flags for handbrake. Thanks again.

10

If you stick with h.264 high 4.1 with a constant frame rate that will give you a file with very broad support for just about any player. I personally tend to use software (ie not Intel or Nvidia) encode, slow, constant quality @ 18 but these settings affect the quality and file size, not the ability of a player to decode them.

11

Interesting. I’ll start experimenting and see what works the best. At this point I’m only playing files off a USB HD attached to the RPi, so I’m really just trying to optimize playback on that device.