Who uses Adjust Display Refresh Rate?

General Discussion
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Show of hands please? Does majority of us use this feature? Or most people keep this disabled?

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  • I enable this option
  • I don’t enable it
  • I don’t know, I haven’t touched anything

0 voters

The above will probably elicit a response.
We trialled enabling it by default in the past, but the results weren’t great. A lot of users wondered why they received a black screen for a couple of seconds after starting playback

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My old TV used to have a black screen for a good 2-3 seconds at the switch, I still had it enabled as I can’t bear the judder.
My new TV does the switch almost instantly…cant even really see it.

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TVs are getting better in that regard. Anyway, a 2-3 second wait is worth it. And remember, there is a setting in Kodi that delays the start of a video after refresh rate change, you can set it from 0.1 to 20.0 settings to match how long your TV typically needs to switch the refresh rate / resolution.

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that’s a nice feature. thanks for sharing this, @gb160!

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thanks for doing a poll, @sam_nazarko!

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Maybe people understand why it happens now and prefer the benefits of adjust display refresh rate?

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Anyone here using a projector? Is it also getting faster to switch? The blank screen is shorter? Like what @gb160 & @Nickelig mentioned?

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Unless someone watches only specific videos and can select their refresh rate and resolution in the system settings there really isn’t any other option than to have adjust display refresh rate set to start/stop.

The second or two it takes for projectors or TVs to adjust really isn’t a good enough reason to compromise playback quality unless it’s a very specific use case and someone is watching security cam footage recorded at very low quality or similar

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Even Apple allows frame rate switching on their Apple TV 4k, so it - and everything that comes with it - are really going mainstream and people learn what and why things happen. This puts more pressure on Sony, LG & Co. to lower the time their TVs need to change refresh rate and/or resolution.

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I have it disabled just because my old TV doesnt support anything besides 60fps.

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that feature is one of the reasons I choose the Vero 4k+, combined with hdr switching.

My TV does the switch without any visible delay.

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What? Dumb question but do you need to/ is there a benefit or advantage?
I admit that I only watch 720p TV so maybe it is not important to me?
What am I missing?

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@Gladfelder I think using the word “need” is debatable but it would be better to use this option when possible. Try enabling it and see if it makes a difference to your viewing. :smile:

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Resolution has nothing to do with the frame rate. The tldr version is that most modern tv’s can operate in all common refresh rates (how often the picture changes every second) and by enabling this option in Kodi it switches your TV to whatever your video is encoded in. With this option off then the video has to be modified whenever your default setting does not match your source. This modification will usually lead to perceptible loss in quality although it is a ymmv type of thing.

This article does a pretty good job explaining the issue.

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AFAIK there is no such thing as 720p TV. Most of what you see on Freeview is SD, which is 720x576i (aka 576i) or 544x576i. If your TV is ‘HD-ready’ it will probably have a 1366x768 screen so at some point the video has to be converted from 576 lines to 768. It seems TVs are usually better at doing that conversion than Kodi is. Adjust refresh rate will let you have your GUI at 1080p but send 576 lines to your TV. On my 10-year-old Panasonic, that definitely gives me a better picture.

Without Adjust refresh rate, your 576 line signal is being converted to the GUI resolution (and framerate) so 1080p or perhaps 720p then being converted again by the TV to 768 lines. You can’t expect the best quality with that.

HD TV is 1080p so if your GUI is set to the same (and 50Hz) Adjust refresh rate doesn’t have any effect.

The only downside is TVs take a couple of seconds to switch resolutions when you start to watch a channel.

Note that switching down from 1080p to 576p has only been available since Kodi v18 (Leia) and you have to use whitelisting. Switching up to 4k was always available.

HTH

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I learned something new from you today. Thanks, @grahamh!

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YW. What I wrote applies to UK TV. I guess you are on 480-line 60Hz TV?

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There are certainly some native 720p projectors. I have it in mind there are a few native 720p TVs as well, but I couldn’t actually name any. :thinking:

But they’re certainly rare, it’s true.

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What I mean is no-one broadcasts 720p. But my world is small.