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To update again.
After attempting nearly every setting that I could possible think of as well as adding the “advandedsettting.xml” and making different changes to it as well, including setting the buffer size to 200MB and the readbufferfactor to 10, this caused the cache to fill up almost instantly. Although, at 200MB it seems that the most it would cache was about 115MB.
I also tried 4 different NAS’s, as well as using different network protocols, NFS, SMB and FTP. Both NFS and FTP seemed worse, not for the skipping, but in general playback.
Anyway, so since nothing that I attempted appeared to make any difference (neither making it worse or better) I decided to just start from scratch. So I did a complete factory rest of the AFTV, then after I only installed XBMC as so to make sure that the issue wasn’t caused by another app that I installed.
After I installed XBMC, I set it up as normal, not making any changes other than to the audio settings for pass-through and enabling the remote control settings (something I’ll get back too). I didn’t make any changes to the video settings other than setting group sets and play back next file automatically.
Then I added my videos to the library, as SMB because as I stated these appears to give the best playback. I didn’t install any add-ons, not that I had any before other than Aeon-Nox 4 (Gotham) and it’s prerequisite add-ons.
I then played the same video as above. This time it played for about 20 min. before showing a skipped frame in the Codecinfo, and during the entire length of the video it only showed skipping about 5 frames. However, even though it only showed 5 frames skipped, while the video was playing you could still see where it would skip a frame here and there even when it didn’t recorded a skipped frame.
Now back to the remote control settings. I enabled the remote controls settings so that I could use the Yaste app to control XBMC (Zeroconfig doesn’t seem to work, even though it does with my RPi). Yaste does not seem to be causing any issues, however, on the app when I would slide the page from the controller screen to the movie info/playback screen XBMC would skip frames. Going the other way it would not, but every time I pulled up the movie info/playback screen it would.
So I disabled the remote control settings (just letting external devices control XBMC). Once I did this the skipping seemed to lessen and I played a few different movies and all played without XBMC recording any skipped frames. Again though, you could still see frames being skipped/dropped during playback, but it didn’t seem to do it as frequently.
Then I decided to change my skin back to Aeon-Nox 4 (Gotham) to see if it made any difference. It did, as soon as I started using Nox the skipping was back, but no were near as bad as it was before I did the factory reset. So I disabled Nox and went back to Confluence, which gave me the same results as before, no recorded skipped frames but still able to see some visually.
To make sure that this wasn’t an issue with just Nox I tried several other skins, all of which produced the same skipping as Nox, more or less, with the exception of Alaska which seemed to have even better playback results than Confluence.
Now, this doesn’t seem that it’s something specific to just skins, as just about anything seems to cause skipping. Even using the default skin (Confluence), pulling up the on-screen-display causes videos to start to skip frames.
This also shouldn’t be an issue with the AFTV not having enough CPU power, as I have run the exact same setup on my RPi, overclocked to 900, and it does not have any of these problems, even using Nox which is way too heavy a skin for the RPi.
Anyway, this is the last I’m adding to this post since it’s been nearly 2 weeks since I started it and no one has seemed to take any interest.
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I cant really add anything to your problem of dropped/skipped frames, as its not an issue I'm seeing (well, except for pausing high bitrate files, when unpausing there are always 3-6 dropped frames as it stutters for a fraction of a second before resuming smoothly, but thats different to what you're seeing). However, for info, regarding the HW accel settings. Having Mediacodec and libstagefright enabled at the same time, is exactly the same as only having mediacodec enabled. ie, only one of them is used, and mediacoded takes preference. To use libstagefright, you need to have mediacodec disabled. I would guess that any small differences you might be seeing with both enabled over just mediacodec are a placebo effect, or just random differences for that run.
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2014-06-09, 19:31
(This post was last modified: 2014-06-09, 20:38 by Tinwarble.)
Yes, I was already aware of that. This is why there are only 2 different log files in the 2nd post, one for libstagefright only and one for libstagefright + mediacodec (since this is the default setting).
But as I stated, libstagefright + mediacodec is only slightly worse than having mediacodec only set as where it comes to skipping frames and as the issue doesn't appear to be related to h/w acceleration (at least not directly) anyway, it's a moot point.
Also, as I stated above I have the exact same setup on my RPi and there are no issues with it, not even dropping or stuttering when pausing then resuming playback or skipping/dropping frames when pulling up the on-screen display. So this is something specific to Android.
EDIT: I will also add this. I have sideloaded MX Player on the AFTV and it does not have any issues playing the same files.
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2014-06-10, 17:29
(This post was last modified: 2014-06-11, 00:17 by Tinwarble.)
And for anyone interested, June 10 Helix nightly does the same thing on Ouya, as well as 13.1 Final.
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2014-06-12, 05:54
(This post was last modified: 2014-06-12, 05:54 by Ned Scott.)
(2014-06-10, 17:29)Tinwarble Wrote: And for anyone interested, June 10 Helix nightly does the same thing on Ouya, as well as 13.1 Final.
I don't have a FireTV, but I have an OUYA, so I took your test files for a spin. Using XBMC v13.1. I'm not seeing any visual skipping with my eyes on either sample file (skipping_test.mkv or B_S_testfile-001.mkv). Does the issue show up on the OUYA when using those specific samples? Maybe they're too short or in the wrong spots to show off the skipping for the OUYA?
(EDIT: also, what movie is skipping_test.mkv from? I kind of want to see this now...)