Windows Video stuttering after some playtime (DVD folder)

Hello,

currently I'm experiencing video stutters when playing a DVD structure. The problem does not occure when skipping to / starting at specific point in the video, it only occures after some time of constant play. Then it starts dropping ~1-2 frames every second, after stopping and resuming the video just plays fine at the same point, until after some time the problem returns.

This problem does not occure with a .mkv (BD-Remux), those play just smooth.

Here's the log: http://pastebin.com/W85t1VPB

After switching on debug mode, I started the movie again and just let it play until the stuttering was clearly visible, in the on-screen debug output it displayed ~48fps instead of 50fps at that points. Then I stopped (~line 1340 in the log) and resumed the video and went back ~1:30 minutes to watch the same part again, there was no stuttering visible, on-screen debug output was also showing ~50fps.

Any ideas on how to fix this are welcome.

Try making an advancedsetting.xml containing the following:

Place this in your userdata folder. See if the FPS gets detected properly now.

Hi kricker,

with the parameter fpsdetect set to 2 it even gets worse, the framedrops become clearly visible after ~11 minutes. Here's the log: http://pastebin.com/vHxtKYns
After removing the parameter from the advancedsettings.xml, the problems takes ~30 minutes to show up. Log: http://pastebin.com/5qAWnYan

Have you tried without an advanced setting file? I see you have many other options set in there.

Haven't tried it without the advancedsettings.xml (special://profile/advancedsettings.xml), but the only things I set in there is a 200ms delay for 24fps movies, the sorting in the music library and the alwayontop-Option. But I see in the logs there's a second advancedsettings.xml (special://xbmc/system/advancedsettings.xml), do you mean that one? Is this file supposed to be there or might this be a leftover from a patched version of the Eden beta (with HD audio) I tried back then?

Also with both advancedsettings.xml removed, the framedrops still occure. I've also tried to remux the DVD folder to a .mkv, but that didn't resolve the problem.
Today I tried something completely different, I just didn't hock up my laptop via HDMI and just played it on my laptop display (60Hz) -> even after 1 hour not one frame had been dropped and the video was playing just fine. Here's the log: http://pastebin.com/74pKaEKN
I then tried it again with connected HDMI but turned off TV, so the laptop display would be used. The video was heavily tearing, a few framedrops occured, but due to the tearing those weren't recognisable. Here's the log: http://pastebin.com/VQuDDq2P

Is there something else I could try to narrow down the source of this problem?

Hmm possibly a GPU or GPU driver issue. Does it send the audio over HDMI as well? If so, can you tell it to only send video and see what happens. When the TV is hooked up, which display is the primary? You probably need the TV set to primary and have the laptop screen not mirroring.

My seutup: laptop -> HDMI (video + audio) -> Denon AVR -> HDMI (video) -> TV
As long as only the AVR is switched on, the laptop display is used, as soon as I switch on the TV, the laptop display is deactivated. There's no mirroring or multi-display active.
So I tried different settings:
- deactivating the hdmi audio in the nvidia control panel -> no change
- switching on A/V synch (video clock) in XBMC -> no change
- switching off adjust display refresh rate in XBMC -> seems to work fine for DVD-Content, BD-Content with micro-stutters

Since you suspected a driver issue i reverted my nvidia driver back to a version from my laptop vendor, which is dated end of 2010. I didn't have the time to do excessiv test yet, but it seems the 1-2 frames dropped per second after ~30 minutes of playtime for DVD-Content is gone. After ~1h of playtime there was a total of 12 frames dropped, which is a big improvement so far. I will make further tests with different content types, to see if I can stay on this driver version or problems occure somewhere else.

Also try going straight to the TV bypassing the AVR, just to make sure it isn't causing any sort of issue.

I did do quite a few test now, switching back and forth different driver versions (incl. complete deinstallation of the drivers) and ended up with the newest version of nvidia (301.42). But I couldn't get a perfect playback setup so far. At this point I have the following problems:

- when I turn off 'adjust display refresh rate' the overall playback just isn't smooth (for 25fps SD content and 23.976fps HD content), but there're no framedrops at all

- with turned on 'adjust display refresh rate' the overall SD content playback is smooth, but from time to time I get short stutters (no framedrops), especially in sections with slow/little movement. If I skip back 30 seconds right after I encountered one of those stuttering moments, then there's no stuttering, so it's not really reproducable.

- with turned on 'adjust display refresh rate' the overall HD content playback is smooth, but I get framedrops ~ 40-50 per movie. With the movies I watched so far I would say max. 10 out of those 40-50 were visible per movie, but still it is annoying.

I also tried connecting directly to the TV, I switched to 'High Performance' in Windows energy settings, but that didn't change anything at all. Any further suggestions on how to get rid of those playback flaws?