[alex_a]

Hi,

For quite a bit, I've been running a private build of XBMC on a Celeron Intel NUC. The build disabled cache rate limiter, but did not introduce any other changes. All the files on my NAS have been playing quite well.

Recently, I've acquired an Amazon FireTV, and installed a stock Gotham 13.1 (since upgraded to stock Gotham 13.2). Both seem to experience a similar problem: some of the larger (~3GB+), HD files either stutter, or subtitles/audio/video get out of sync or both. NUC (or for that matter, RPi using the same patched code) doesn't exhibit this problem.

Some facts:
- both NUC and FireTV are on the same wired network (I literally unplug one and plug in the other to test)
- Attempting to modify cache settings the 'official' way didn't help
- Watching debug settings/CPU, I see one of the cores *occasionally* running hot or even maxing out, but overall CPU is at below 30% (125% displayed) at all times

So, the question is -- is it
- CPU power difference between the systems (I'd expect FireTV be at least stronger than RPi)
- my patch was masking some issues with the files/network (the patch is here: https://github.com/w3sip/xbmc/commit/018...3657921f89 and https://github.com/w3sip/xbmc/commit/439...3664139043)
or
- some new bug was introduced between the time when I forked, and 13.1/13.2


How do I go about troubleshooting this? On the same note, I'd gladly share the problematic file if some of the core developers would like to take a look. The problem can be reproduced 100% of the time

[Ned Scott]

Can you get us a debug log (wiki) during playback? This is probably above my area of knowledge, but some ideas that come to mind would be to check to make sure some other activity isn't happening in XBMC that is just enough to lag up other things.

[alex_a]

I'll try to -- going to be away for a week on some business travel. For now I've spent some time today restoring my XBMC build environment (this time forking off the tip of 13.2) -- will try bypassing the cache limiter. If that works, I'll be right back to what I was running, but if it doesn't will have a better binary to produce some extra debug logging, if needs to be.

Will have more next weekend ...

[alex_a]

In the end, it turned out to be a buggy (?) hardware decoding option. When I switched the option to run with software decoding, the problems (including some issues with Fast Forward) were resolved.

On the downside, the APK that I've built refuses to run on FireTV. Oh, well -- will try again if/when there's another problem