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I followed drewjack0n's advice of trying a different video card. I pulled the 8600GT out of my desktop.
I was already running the NVIDIA 169 drivers, so the 8600GT worked fine with no changes to any of my settings.
I started up the killasampla and dropped an immediate 8 frames then flawless playback rest of the way (CPU peak ~75%). I still, however, was dropping lots of frames on my own BluRay rip of Enchanted. I decided to re-install the 169 drivers to see if that would help. No change after reinstallation.
I removed the 8600GT and am again using onboard video. Odd thing is, I tried the killasampla and only dropped about 350 frames (instead of the typical 531). I played the video again and only dropped ~150... Finally, on the third playing, dropped frames were only ~50. Every subsequent playing of the sample yields <50 dropped frames.
My guess is that my recent success is linked to the 169 driver reinstall... odd, though, because I have installed at least 3 different versions of NVIDIA drivers to see if it would make a difference and it never did.
With regards to the Enchanted.mkv file, perhaps my encoding is just more taxing than the killasampla? I really didn't do any encoding, I just remuxed a BLU-RAY .m2ts into an MKV container with a TrueHD (converted into FLAC) audio stream.
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Yeah this is indeed odd, because far from the killasampla I was watching a DVD I ripped to H264/AC3 and was getting a few dropped frames per second mostly during panning camera movements. It is only a 1.7Mbit average file, CPU usage was about 20% and I still was dropping frames. I even tried turning off sws and going with bilinear and nearest neighbor resizing with no luck. I'm in the process of doing more encodes of it to see if I can narrow down where the problem is, which may have an impact on your issue too Polysemous.
I just learned that polysemous is actually a real word too. wow!
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2008-07-05, 20:56
Polysemous:
8 frames followed by flawless playback is literally identical to what I experience with my setup.. I consider that to be no problem because the first 8 frames or so dropping is not noticeable. Very interesting to hear that your own Blu-Ray rips are having problems and the Killa Sampla is playing back "fine". I'm not sure what to make of this as I have never ripped a Blu-Ray myself.
Another interesting test would be to enable debug output in the log and "tail" it during Killa Sampla playback.... The point of this being you never bring up the OSD... I think whatever overhead is involved in displaying the OSD causes a few frames to be dropped (at times). Anyways, just try checking the log file during Killa Sampla playback and see what it has to say (don't bring up the OSD).
Good luck
NOW: AppleTV+CrystalHD PREVIOUS: HTPC and XBOX (both loudly running XBMC)
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I see some dropped frames right at start, just like when I pause or FFWD a movie - is normal.
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after a lot of struggling with some 1080p content, i had to declare myself defeated and put my Q6600 with 2GB ram and onboard 7150@512MB at 1080i to have smooth playback with nvidia 173.14.05-envy, even following all the tutorials and tips i've seen around... anyway, i'm quite satisfied of the result, waiting for some new nvidia driver (nor 169.x nor 177.x beta seem to help) to have hdmi audio and maybe some kind of better playback
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Polysemous - it occurs to me after much thought that the encoding you are trying to play back MIGHT not be setup for multicore decoding - that would explain poor performance maybe. Near as I can tell you've not reencoded the video from the original BD movie but instead simply placed it from the disk into a MKV file - yes? If I understand the multicore decoding properly the ability to use more than one core lies partly in the way the video was encoded, not done properly and the multiple cores don't help.
I always reencode, it saves space to say the least! Also, is it possible that the codec in the original movie was VC-1 and not H.264? VC-1 playback hasn't been nearly as stable so perhaps that could be it too. I've found that I can reencode with fairly high bitrate and lots of bells\whistles turned on using meGUI and X.264 which saves me about 30-50% disk space from the original. Last but not least FLAC is WAY more demanding to decode than say AC3 which is what I use. AC3 will save you a TON of space too and I cannot hear the difference - my system is also only 5.1.
Anyway, if you are interested in trying to recode etc. I can help you ouot with it as I've now done it a few dozen times for both HD-DVD and BD\BD+. With the exception of occasionally grabbing the wrong soundtrack, easy to fix, I have had great success. Check out the eac3to thread on Doom9 for more info, I've got a tutorial or so around too where I was sharing as I learned how to do this stuff.
Good Luck!
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BLKMGK - You are correct... I wasn't really re-encoding, just re-wrapping with MKV. Since my last post, I re-encoded the trouble video (Enchanted).... using a mixture of your methods (found in your signature) and another online tutorial.. I used XVID encoding. It cut the file almost in half, and I can't tell any difference in quality on my 60" screen. BEST OF ALL... XBMC plays the newly encoded file flawlessly!
To avoid bringing us too much OT, I'll summarize my (supposed) findings, in other words--I'll state the obvious--
1.) Onboard NVIDIA 7100 CAN play 1080p content. It hasn't been able to play anything I throw at it, though.
2.) Not all 1080p videos are created equal--re-encoding content using a lossy codec can lead to better playback.
3.) Installing the correct NVIDIA drivers (and proper configuration) is CRUCIAL
For me, I believe my poor playback was a result of video driver problems and testing with content too demanding for ANY system
Thanks to everyone for all of the help!
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Following up on my problem, I have only narrowed it down to variable frame rate video files. Something may actually be wrong with the either the encoder putting out bad timestamps or ffmpeg is reporting bad timestamps. In either case, frames are coming into CDVDPlayerVideo::OutputPicture with timestamps about about 110-120ms too late for presentation despite CPU usage being around 20% and vsync off. The same file plays fine at 29.97fps or 23.976fps with no dropped frames after the initial sync.
I'll have to dump the file frame by frame and see if it is encoded wrong, if ffmpeg is feeding them to xbmc wrong, or if xbmc is miscalculating something. My money is on one of the first two.
Either way, this turned out to not be a performance issue at all so I'll stop bringing it up here.
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The recent cross-platform release inspired me to dig a little deeper into my dropped frames problem. . .
I tried 3 XBMC verions:
XBMC Live
XBMC for Linux (Ubuntu 8.04)
XBMC for Windows
Both the Live and Linux versions (not surprisingly) produced identical results as previously discussed in this thread.
The windows version, however, solved ALL dropped frames! I'm assuming NVIDIA driver support in Windows is better than Linux?
Overall, a great product and I for one am appreciative of the versatility multi-platforms offers.
Looks like I'll be sticking with the windows version.
Now if I can only figure out Multi-channel FLAC over HDMI and that darn MCE remote. Off to the search function!!
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Add "Triplebuffer" "True" to xong conf file .. it worked for me as far is nvidia chipsets go
