[bhampton]

Hi,

I use a Asus Chromebox running OpenElec (that is still XBMC or am I totally in the wrong place?)

Anyways,... My goal is to consolidate my media and my problem is MKV files made from Blu Ray play apparently perfect but MKV files made from DVD show all kinds of motion problems. Sometimes more notice-able ...

Looks like a mis match of frame rates catches up every so often making for a judder or micro stutter.

I have no idea what to do about it and for now I've just deleted all my DVDs from my NAS and tried to forget them.

Sadly, even though I have 10 times as many Blu Rays, I still have some very wonderful films on DVDs that have not gone to Blu yet.

Anyone have suggestions or tips for getting my DVD files to play? Attempts to google it out haven't worked yet.

Edit for hardware... Sony HW30 Front Projector (1080P .... at 24fps), Asus Chromebox, Lenovo NAS with NFS sharing, Gigabit network...

[jmhenry5150]

Not too sure about the MKV issue - but what I do is make an ISO out the of the DVD, usually stripping out everything but just the movie...

[bhampton]

Ok Thanks,.... I do believe a problem was with the files I was making.

However, after reading more posts about it I found details about making DVD backups are against the rules I think so I think it's better just left at that.

In my case,... I just don't use XBMC for DVDs for now and I'm fine with that actually... All my remaining DVDs can fit in a box and I will always have some type of disc player in my system.

Slowly, I hope to replace most of them with Blu Rays.


Thanks Again,

=Brian

[skylarking]

KMV is simply(?) a container format with video objects stored inside in a similar vein to a ZIP file being a container format with individual documents/files/etc inside.
As such, it's best to consider that you can't play an MKV file itself, just as you don't edit a zip file itself (you unpack/extract a document and use for example libbreoffice to edit this document)
Probably the closer reality is that MKV files are 'opened/unpacked' on the fly and the viode objects within are decoded to play the video.

Anyway, whether the video objects inside the MKV container can actually be played by XBMC very much depends on how these objects were encoded before being placed into the MKV container itself.
But as XBMC, like VLC, can play just about any video encoding that exists today, since they are based on FFMPEG, you should not be having playback issues.
And the fact that you can play BD MKV files adds an interesting mix to your playback issue :?

Note that i use makemkv to rip the main movie from my DVD's.
I understand that this tool removes CSS (and other protections) from the video objects within the disk and saves these (VOB?) objects into a MKV container.
In essence the main movie has not be re-encoded before being stored within the MKV container, it is the same as what was on the DVD (minus the ineffective protection overhead).
As such, if a DVD plays OK within XBMC, then you should expect the KMV equivalant to also play fine within XBMC.

So if you are having playback issues, then it's probably that the tool you used to rip the DVD and/or create the MKV that is resulting in some faulty re-encoding of the DVD video objects on the disk.
Playing back these faulty re-encoded video objects is likely causing your playback problem.

A simplest check, if your HTPC has a DVD drive attached, is to play the DVD via XBMC and if it plays OK the problem is likely to be the tool you used to rip the DVD and/or create the MKV

Alternatively, if you have PAL region DVD's and rip these to play on NTSC region TV's, or the other flip side, you may get stutters depending on whether the DVD player or TV correctly decodes the foreign format properly :?
If your TV can handle all standards (most can) then try setting <Video Settings><Playback> to "Adjust display refresh rate to match video" if not already the case...

As always, looking at/posting your debug log may give you/others some ideas as to what is the root cause of the issue.

[nickr]

Are you playing back at the same framerate as your source material? Pressing 'O' on a keyboard will tell you a lot of info about what is happening.

[bhampton]

MakeMKV was used for all my files. My display can change refresh rate and supports many options (Sony HW30 front projector).

Frame rate must be the problem I think... Will try the "press O" suggestion.

I believe I have the adjust display to match video enabled. Will double check that too.

Thanks

[bhampton]

I think I found and fixed the problem I was having.

When I went to look at my projectors refresh rate it was 1080i.

Sometimes I listen to music with the XBMC unit without the projector on and If I boot it that way it looks to the Denon AVR for hdmi handshake info.

I rebooted the Chromebox and the resolution went back to 1080p24 and changed automatically to 1080p60 for DVD sources.

So, I think it was a HDMI handshake issue. I put a command to restart the Chromebox after powering up the projector in my "watch movies" activity and I think that should fix it.

-Brian

[skylarking]

I dislike aspects of EDID and fully hate HDCP.
The former has workarounds but the later is an absolute pain.

Such mechanisms can be great but can sometimes catch you out so i prefer control of my hardware.
And too much h/w intelligence only causes problems and one day skynet will kick us to the curb...

Anyway great to hear you have resolved your issue