Choppy playback, high CPU usage
#1
New guy here, searched a bit couldn't find anything. I'm running an XP computer, with a 3TB external HD. I've got 135+ movies, a couple TV series, and a handful of cartoons. Everything has been fine and dandy until I added 7 more movies to the hard drive, and now like the subject says, playback is choppy, and the system usage hovers around 50%, and xbmc hovers around 45-50% CPU usage. Also, all my movies are 4g (MKV) or smaller, 480i running through an old school tube tv. I take my setup to my cabin, because I don't want to pay for cable, or internet. Here are some specs..... More info as I proof read this... I installed Fusion, and wizard something to clear cache. Said there were 4 items, didn't solve anything.... Nice thing about the setup below is I was able to find a video card with S-video (remember hooking up to old school tv) that didn't have fans, or require higher wattage power supply. I'm also working with a slim PC so that's a challenge as well. but again, here are the specs, hope it helps...



Frodo 12.2--- Later versions won't work with XP
Win XP SP3...32bit
Inspiron 530S...Intel ® pentium ® Dual CPU E2140 1.6GHz .....1GHz ram
video card - ATI Radeon X1300/X1550....256MB DDR2
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#2
For a new guy the old message: Debug Log

Your GPU plain sucks and your CPU is not really good in multithreaded decoding. Your memory is quite limited even for XP. And(!) we don't support XP anymore.
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
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#3
I'll try and post a log tomorrow. I bought the PC for my father-in-law about 5yrs ago or so, it was when vista was out and showing bad signs, Dell offered to sell me an XP machine with the same specs. We bought it for him to pay his bills online, That's about all he did with it. It works well for what I use it for. Wife and I just had our first kid, and I really don't want to spend money on a new PC just to watch movies at our cabin that we go to 15 times a yr.

Just wondering if it worked so well with all the movies I had, why would adding a small percentage of movies make such a big deal. It didn't run any faster when I only had 2 movies vs 100 movies

Thanks for the help
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#4
Does the choppy playback only happen with newer movies? are your others that you had before this problem still ok?

If so check for differences between type of video & audio files contain with MediaInfo to try and see if there's a pattern of certain codec types causing the problem
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#5
(2014-09-15, 09:41)jjd-uk Wrote: Does the choppy playback only happen with newer movies? are your others that you had before this problem still ok?

If so check for differences between type of video & audio files contain with MediaInfo to try and see if there's a pattern of certain codec types causing the problem

Does on all videos now. I may try and remove one movie at a time to see if there's a particular movie doing this.... Still witch makes no sense, because they're all the same format, and uploaded the same, using makemkv.

On a side note, it is super slow on the TV and on the computer monitor. If that has anything to do with it.
Thanks again for helping
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#6
As fritsch said, please provide a debug log.

However something you could do is take it back to as if it was brand install, do this by finding your XBMC appdata folder and make a backup by copying it to somewhere safe and then delete the XBMC folder, this will quickly tell you if it's and install/configuration issue.

If you don't know where this is located then find Run on the Windows Start Menu, then in the Run window type %appdata% in the Open box and select OK, this should open the Appdata -> Roaming folder for the user account, and within that you should see the XBMC folder.

Do a bare minimum configuration, so set basic video and audio settings and add the sources (set content type to none as don't want anything added to Library at this time in case this is the issue) and use file view to try playing back a few movies to see if you still get issues with normal file playback.

This a drastic test, but the quickest way to prove if it's configuration/addon etc related. Once done then you can delete the XBMC appdata folder again and put back the copy you took at the start and all should be as before.
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#7
here's the log. after setting up debugging, i closed out xbmc, re-opened, then tried to play a movie for about a minute. hopefully this log will show something.

http://xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=295991
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#8
was this log useful at all?
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#9
There is a problem with your sound drivers
Quote:22:00:30 T:524 ERROR: CAESinkDirectSound::Initialize: cannot create secondary buffer (DSERR_INVALIDPARAM)
22:00:30 T:524 DEBUG: CSoftAE::InternalOpenSink - NULL Initialized:
22:00:30 T:524 DEBUG: Output Device : Device not found
22:00:30 T:524 DEBUG: Sample Rate : 48000
22:00:30 T:524 DEBUG: Sample Format : AE_FMT_S16NE
22:00:30 T:524 DEBUG: Channel Count : 2
22:00:30 T:524 DEBUG: Channel Layout: RAW,RAW
22:00:30 T:524 DEBUG: Frames : 24000
22:00:30 T:524 DEBUG: Frame Samples : 2

It only initializes a fixed HD audio device and a modem(!)

Quote:21:59:41 T:3172 NOTICE: Found 1 Lists of Devices
21:59:41 T:3172 NOTICE: Enumerated DirectSound devices:
21:59:41 T:3172 NOTICE: Device 1
21:59:41 T:3172 NOTICE: m_deviceName : {bd6dd71a-3deb-11d1-b171-00c04fc20001}
21:59:41 T:3172 NOTICE: m_displayName : Realtek HD Audio output
21:59:41 T:3172 NOTICE: m_displayNameExtra: DirectSound: Realtek HD Audio output
21:59:41 T:3172 NOTICE: m_deviceType : AE_DEVTYPE_PCM
21:59:41 T:3172 NOTICE: m_channels : FL,FR
21:59:41 T:3172 NOTICE: m_sampleRates : 96000
21:59:41 T:3172 NOTICE: m_dataFormats : AE_FMT_FLOAT,AE_FMT_AC3
21:59:41 T:3172 NOTICE: Device 2
21:59:41 T:3172 NOTICE: m_deviceName : {c2ad1800-b243-11ce-a8a4-00aa006c4501}
21:59:41 T:3172 NOTICE: m_displayName : Modem #0 Line Playback (emulated)
21:59:41 T:3172 NOTICE: m_displayNameExtra: DirectSound: Modem #0 Line Playback (emulated)
21:59:41 T:3172 NOTICE: m_deviceType : AE_DEVTYPE_PCM
21:59:41 T:3172 NOTICE: m_channels : FL,FR
21:59:41 T:3172 NOTICE: m_sampleRates : 96000
21:59:41 T:3172 NOTICE: m_dataFormats : AE_FMT_FLOAT,AE_FMT_AC3

Disable passthrough completely and set number of speakers to 2.0
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
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