AppleTV 2 (black) iOS 5.1 & XBMC

Nothing to see but some discontinuity errors which indicate close to buffering/network bandwith/cpu maxed out - problem.

Do you have deinterlacing turned on or turned to auto? Maybe your episodes are detected as interlaced by failure and this kicks the de-interlacer in which just maxes out the cpu then?

I just checked and deinterlacing is off. I also just nuked my userdata folder. No improvement.

It's very weird. Like I said, it plays most 720p content fine and a lot of SD stuff also looks perfect. But these particular shows (Daily Show/Colbert Report) have this weird jerky playback. EDIT: I have now found some other shows which have the same problem, but still, a lot of SD stuff plays fine.

And they played fine before I upgraded ATV2.

EDIT: Also I should have mentioned that the ATV2 is connected to a WiFi-N network with full signal strength and it's pretty much the only device on that WiFi network.

daily show and colbert report are encoded at 60 fps which the apple tv can have trouble playing back. the xvid version is 30 fps and should play fine.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=103957

(2012-04-26 17:58)sams0n Wrote:  daily show and colbert report are encoded at 60 fps which the apple tv can have trouble playing back. the xvid version is 30 fps and should play fine.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=103957

The problem that he is having appears to be with the SD versions of the show based on his log. I have the same issue with the Daily Show, but the hiccup errors only seem to appear on SD at 30fps, all the 24fps stuff plays fine. I'm still on 5.0, but have the same problem. After perusing the log a bit for differences between The Daily Show/Colbert Report vs Glee (which I assume is the SD show that worked) the only difference I noticed was this:

23:02:20 T:133009408 DEBUG: CDVDPlayer::HandleMessages - player started 2
23:02:20 T:133009408 DEBUG: CDVDPlayer::SetCaching - caching state 3

The first two both started with caching state 0. I have no idea if this is relevant, but that's the only immediate difference I noticed.

EDIT: I went ahead and enable debug logging on my install and tested some videos. I don't see anything in the logs, but I did notice that the onscreen debug text indicated that the fps never went over 28fps, even though cpu was never maxed. Not quite sure what's limiting it, but a display rate that's less than the video frame rate seems like the most obvious cause of the stutter.

UPDATE: After playing around with the settings it appears that the combination between 30fps material and upscaling is the issue. When I changed the view mode to original size (which is a tiny box in the middle of the screen) the video plays without stutter.

Any one else having trouble playing 720p content (h.264 or xvid) when ever I play 720p I having issues with xbmc crashing especially with higher bitrates

(2012-04-28 16:08)bladeds Wrote:  Any one else having trouble playing 720p content (h.264 or xvid) when ever I play 720p I having issues with xbmc crashing especially with higher bitrates

ATV2 will not play 720p content that's xvid encoded - those are software decoded and the ATV2 can't handle it. h.264 is hardware accelarated, but if you are playing files with higher bitrates, it can also struggle.

Just to add anything over 25mbps seems to make it struggle.

(2012-04-28 17:50)deanmv Wrote:  Just to add anything over 25mbps seems to make it struggle.

Thanks, I was trying to remember that number. I looked for the thread where someone had tested it out, but couldn't find it.

One of these days we should hammer out a little chart showing what the ATV2 can currently do with a given version of XBMC (and maybe against the iOS version as well?)

Seems like a moving target, so it would be interesting to have a thread where we all try to get specific condition results. Hmmm...

Is there anything that would have affected SD playback from iOS 4.2 to 5.0? The files that I am talking about played fine with Eden/4.2 and now suffer jerky, warping playback in Eden/5.0.