Video freezing randomly

sbaydush · 12 November 2016 11:51

Hi,
I have a vero 2 with the latest update installed. When playing movies via USB 3 HDD directly attached to the vero 2, no matter what video I am playing, the video will freeze randomly throughout the video with the audio still going and within 5 seconds, the video will speed to catch up and then it will be fine until it does it again. I have disabled watchdog because I thought that was causing the issue. I also checked the buffer settings and it is set to buffer for local media with the highest buffer size. Any other ideas?

EDIT: Logs - http://paste.osmc.io/sukijureje
EDIT2: The video I was playing was Disney’s frozen btw.
Thanks,
Stephen

Toast · 12 November 2016 11:51

mind giving a debug log

makes it easier for Sam or any other moderator to give real support

sbaydush · 12 November 2016 12:27

Just added the logs, sorry about that.

Toast · 12 November 2016 12:32

No worries makes it alot less guess work for those that fix issues

sam_nazarko · 12 November 2016 14:58

Hi

I had a quick look at the log and saw some discontinuity, but nothing immediately obvious as to why you might be having problems.

07:25:43 T:3010458608    INFO: CAESinkALSA - Unable to open device "sysdefault:CARD=AMLM8AUDIO" for playback
07:25:43 T:3010458608    INFO: CAESinkALSA - Unable to open device "default:CARD=AMLM8AUDIO" for playback

That’s a bit weird. I can see you’ve installed a fair amount of stuff on the device. Is anything using the audio sink? I’m guessing you want audio out of HDMI: make sure SPDIF is selected in Settings.

I also saw that you’ve installed Node (for a more modern version, you may wish to use Node’s repository and npm directly).

Any background services running that might be hogging CPU?
What filesystem is the hard disk formatted as?
Does this occur for all videos? Just to get an idea: does this 1080p Big Buck Bunny clip work? http://mirrorblender.top-ix.org/peach/bigbuckbunny_movies/big_buck_bunny_1080p_h264.mov.
If ‘frozen.mkv’ is small enough, does copying it to /home/osmc and playing from there improve things?

Sam

sbaydush · 12 November 2016 15:17

I installed Node to check for an amazon prime dash button so a user could reboot the device if the UI froze without unplugging it and crashing the device. It was having this issue before I installed node yesterday as well.

I just changed the audio settings as you suggested.

The CPU stays around 15-30% usage max while playing a video (used htop via ssh to see this)

The external USB 3.0 drive is connected directly and the drive is formatted as NTFS (could be the issue?) Is there a better file system I should use that would drastically speed it up?

I am trying to copy the movie right now and i am getting only 12.50MBps and slows down to as slow as 1.5MBps and then goes back to around 12.50 MBps transfer rate from the external drive to the internal storage. Is that normal??

It happens for the last 4 movies I have tried but I can’t download that big buck video because the internet where I am is very limited and very slow at the moment.

I will respond once I test frozen while playing from the internal storage to let you know what happens.

Thanks!

sam_nazarko · 12 November 2016 15:45

NTFS uses a FUSE implementation under Linux. If the kernel module improves, I will try and move away from FUSE in the future. There will also be the benefit of readahead which would improve things.

exFAT is a better bet (still uses FUSE, but not as bad).

I suspect the issue is caused by low throughput with NTFS on Linux.

Sam

sbaydush · 12 November 2016 15:45

Would ext3 or 4 be better than exfat?

sam_nazarko · 12 November 2016 15:46

ext4 will be good. The only reason I did not suggest this is because some users like to connect the drive to a Windows PC or Mac

One other tip: make sure the hard disk is connected to a side port, and not the rear port. The rear port is ideally for the remote controller, and you will encounter lower speeds if you connect peripherals to that port.

Toast · 12 November 2016 16:06

you can use ext4 in windows with some simple programs like

if you want to move data from the drive etc however i recommend using samba for that.

just saying it is possible

sam_nazarko · 12 November 2016 16:07

Yes, but that is proprietary, and probably best avoided.

Samba is a good idea. It can be installed from the App Store.

Toast · 12 November 2016 16:07

been using it for years so far no issues just a shitty ui.

sbaydush · 12 November 2016 16:20

I just formatted a secondary USB hdd with ext4 and copied frozen to it and it still does it while reading off the ext4 drive

Toast · 12 November 2016 16:22

fork over the logs again so we can compare

sam_nazarko · 12 November 2016 16:31

Is the drive plugged in to a side USB port?
Does playback from /home/osmc work OK?

I’m assuming the drive is healthy (SMART data is OK etc). Some drives sometimes try and reread a sector over and over again.

Sam

sbaydush · 12 November 2016 16:32

New Logs with frozen on different usb drive formatted as ext4 (same issue is happening) : http://paste.osmc.io/hudakobiga

The USB drives are now plugged into the side usb ports as before (first post) it was plugged into the rear usb port.

The files are too big to fit on the internal storage unfortunately. I tested a much smaller video file, (200MB for 20 min video vs 5.5GB (frozen) for 2 hour movie, to the internal storage and it didn’t seem to have an issue.

EDIT: I just restarted the video from the start and it always freezes at timestamp 1:04. If i rewind 10 seconds and play again, it doesn’t freeze at that timestamp.

sam_nazarko · 12 November 2016 17:20

Hi

You’ll need the USB drive in the side port, it won’t have good throughput in the rear port.

This suggests a possible bandwidth issue with the drive. This kind of problem can be hard to investigate.

Do you still have buffermode=1? Can you give me the MediaInfo for the file?

Thanks

sbaydush · 12 November 2016 17:27

buffermode is still set to 1. See the link below for the mediainfo.

http://paste.osmc.io/okadikasun.vhdl

sam_nazarko · 12 November 2016 17:28

The clip looks OK.

Make sure that Adjust Refresh Rate is enabled so that the video plays back smoothly.

If still problematic, produce a small sample with something like mkvtoolnix that reproduces the problem reliably and I’ll investigate here.

sbaydush · 26 November 2016 14:05

Sorry for the late response. I just got back to where I was able to troubleshoot more with the device. I have wiped it to factory defaults first to the newest version and it still had the issue and then i used an older image from a few months ago and its having the same issue when using it with no additional services or anything installed. I have made a smaller clip displaying the issue and have uploaded it to dropbox (see link below). The issue happens at 1:04 timestamp with the snowflake freezing. if you rewind, it doesn’t have the issue, only when it plays from the beginning does it have the issue on my device. It also plays fine on vlc on my computer.