[Ainuke]

I've been using XBMC for a little over a year with litle issue running through a 720p DLP HDTV.
We just upgraded to a new LED flat panel TV, and I've been starting to replace my library with 1080p source material. Unfortunately, I've been getting dropped frames playing back said 1080p files (.mkv).
Plex plays them great, but I do not want to go back and deal with the many niggling issues it has with OSX.

I've tried going through settings>video>playback systematically selecting then de-selecting render method, display refresh, etc. most deviations from the defaults resulted in worse performance.
I finally chose the realtime performance overlay "O" key and saw that the CPU usage was over 100% on the scenes that had noticeable frame drops. With that went dips below 22fps, sometimes as low as 15-17fps. On scenes with lots of black/dark and shading, the CPU pegged near 115%.

Does this seem right? System specs aren't that lousy (see below).
The same file, same scenes run about 11-15% CPU usage on my windows desktop (although that has a 4GHz 8 core CPU, but still...).

Here is the log. It's my first time posting a log here, so take it easy on me if I haven't done so correctly.
Here is the MediaInfo for the source file.


Client Specs:
2010 Mac Mini (2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8600, 8GB RAM, nVidia 320M)
OSX 10.8.5
Display: 50" Sharp LED panel
Gigabit Ethernet

XBMC v12.3 GIT:20131212-9ED3E58 (compiled: Dec 23 2013)

Server Specs:
AMD Phenom II x4 965 3.4GHz, 8GB RAM
WHS2011
Gigabit Ethernet

Hope I've included all the needed info.
Thanks in advance!

[Ned Scott]

The problem is "Video: h264 (High 10)"

Avoid High 10, Hi10P, 10-bit. There are no consumer hardware video decoders for that profile of H.264, because the Hi10P profile wasn't meant to be used in consumer space. Even then, you normally only see it used for animated videos, but some encoders don't understand formats and use it on live action.

Even then, you do have enough CPU power to playback those files, so it's not essential that you do this. I wouldn't touch the files, myself, but to each their own.

If you don't want to re-download or re-encode the videos, download the latest beta (wiki) of v13 Gotham. Software decoding normally only uses one processing core in XBMC, but Hi10P will automatically be multi-core processed in v13, so playback should be a lot smoother. It will still use a lot of CPU power, unless you avoid the Hi10P downloads/encodes.

[Ainuke]

Thanks, Ned.

I installed v13 and all is well now. CPU usage is actually higher now (>120%) for high bitrate scenes, but without the frame drops (from 300-400/minute to <10). It's totally watchable now, which is what I ultimately want. I'll look into transcoding to a better format when I have time.

I think part of what was confusing me was the >100% CPU measurement. My preferred environment is Windows, and Task Manager reports total CPU % up to 100, rather than 100 per-core, as OSX Activity Minitor appears to be doing.

Anyway, thanks again for the info and advice .
Now I'm off to make sure there're no beta issues that could pounce on unsuspecting family members looking to watch a flick. This is our primary HT source, so I generally avoid betas.
And also to try to figure out how to keep the firewall from asking for permission for XBMC Gotham again.
(I've done it before, but forgotten how).

Peace

[clipper99]

One thing I have noticed having converted from Windows to OSX recently is XBMC really seems to put a higher demand on the CPU on my OSX systems. I don't know the technical reasons why and I have found that certain skins ramp my CPU usage WAY up. I actually had to stop using my favourite (currently anyways ) skin on the MacBook as merely at the home screen the system fan would spool right up because of CPU demand. I run XBMC on both a MacBook Pro Retina (2013) and Hackintosh Box and CPU use is high on both systems.