[beeswax]

Important required stuff:

XBMC Version: Kodi 14.0 RC2
OS: Windows 8.1 Enterprise x64
Device: Intel NUC D34010WYK
CPU: i3-4010U @ 1.70GHz
RAM: 4GB DDR3
GPU: Intel Integrated Graphics
GPU Driver: 15.36.7.3960 (latest currently available from Intel)
Audio Device: WASAPI instance of Denon AVR-1912 connected via HDMI
MediaInfo of sample

Since updating to Helix (I've been trying it since beta4) I'm getting regular freezing of playback with H264 files recorded from satellite (Freesat). The freezes only ever occur at edit points where commercials have been cut out. All editing is done with VideoReDo 4 and these freezes do not occur when using Gotham. Here is a sample which illustrates the problem (edit at 14s):

Channel 4 HD edited sample

The freezing only occurs when hardware acceleration (DXVA2) is applied, software rendering is fine but of course this pushes the CPU much harder and is more susceptible to dropping frames. This may be hardware specific as the freeze does not occur on my desktop machine (Win 8.1 Ent x64, i7 3770k, Nvidia GTX980) with h/w acceleration enabled. When it does occur, the video freezes on the last frame before the cut and the audio continues as far as "I saw Jeniffer Aniston's....." and then also stops. Kodi then just sits there with the frozen image seemingly indefinitely.

Here is a debug log. Playback is triggered on line 2210 at exactly 15:11. Is this to do with the new version of ffmpeg in Kodi?

edit: replaced log with a cleaner reproduction of issue.

[FernetMenta]

on Intel I can reproduce every now and then. it crashes deep in ffmpeg. not sure if I can persuade the crappy Windows tool chain to give me more information ....

[beeswax]

Thanks for taking a look, much appreciated. If I should be raising this elsewhere, please let me know.

[FernetMenta]

could you please try this test build: http://mirrors.xbmc.org/test-builds/win3...ecoder.exe

[beeswax]

Stellar work FernetMenta, I've played the test clip (and original episode) several times and it's not frozen once! Thank you so much for investigating this and getting to the bottom of it. Out of curiosity, what did you have to change?

[Martijn]

https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/5901 here's what changed

[FernetMenta]

Out of curiosity, what did you have to change?

I investigated a similar issue for videos where aspect ratio changes. In those cases FFmpeg signals a change and we open a new hardware decoder. After we did this we disposed the old one. Looks like that there are still references to the old one at this time. Now disposal is deferred after the next decoding cycle.

[beeswax]

Awesome, well I'm certainly glad that other problem was already on the radar as it sounds like it expedited your discovery of the fix for this. Thanks again

[beeswax]

Sorry for the dumb question but I see RC3 is out - how does one determine if a fix (this fix) has made it into an actual release? On GitHub, if I go to 14.0rc3-Helix all it lists is "[release] bump to 14.0 rc3". The tree and commit links on the left don't offer much more. I'm sure I'm doing it wrong but it's not very obvious to me.