[nathanashton]

Hi Guys,

IM running XBMC on Windows XP SP2 and am getting some "non fluid" video playback. When I press "O" to bring up the details, the dropped frame count is always around 13 - 30. This is for both lowish quality SD and HD Content. MP4's H264, MKV and AVI's also.

Im running a Gigabyte 73- SM something or other with AMD 4850E CPU and Geoforce 8200 onboard, 2GB Ram, outputting over HDMI to 32 inch TV.

VSync is on. Upscaling is turned off (with it on there is no difference). CPU usage only gets up to 40% for 1080P MKVs.

I downloaded and ran the KillaSample and had 90 dropped frames, but I get the impression that is quite normal.

Any ideas / suggestions.

Cheers

[Louike]

i wonder about this too, i appear to loose some frames when caching. about 8 to 15 making audio a little out of sync.

[TheJaff2]

I always have 5-20 dropped frames (ONLY in the beginning of playback) no matter what file I play, even KillaSample, so I reckon it's quite normal. (E7300 cpu 3gb ram)

[nathanashton]

Yeh, I keep getting dropped frames continuously.

On the SD content, it's not too noticeable and I could probably live with it, but on the HD content I have (primarily) MKV's it's quite bad.

Interesting thing was it seemed to work ok until I increased the cache sizes. Since then it has gone downhill. Ive put the cache's back to what I think was the default but it hasnt corrected itself unfortunately.

[mutenroid]

I can confirm the dropped frames too. Continuosly, only noticable with HD content like 1080p mkv files. My graphic card is an integrated Radeon HD 3200.

The software is beautiful, but fails for the main use...watch movies!

MediaPortal it's ugly but in combination with CoreAVC the movies runs perfectly!!!

PD: Sorry for my english

[alanwww1]

I can clearly see some dropped frames/stuttering even if the dropped frames counster is not changing.

I think it is the problem of the OPENGL renderer. It eigter needs to be improved in timing or there should be some other renderer used just for video playback.

Otherwise the software is really well designed and looks wonderfull.

This is why i donated hoping that video playback will be improved.

[SlaveUnit]

Are you playing these movies locally on the box or across a network?

[mutenroid]

Are you playing these movies locally on the box or across a network?

In my case always from hard disk, my config is:

Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H
Core2Duo E6750
2Gb RAM
Vista x86
HDD 1TB Samsung HD103J

Playing 1080p mkv from MediaPlayer HC or Mediaportal (w/CoreAVC) runs without jitter.

[mach170]

I was able to eliminate my dropped frame issue by changing the audio output in XBMC from digital to analog. It seems my onboard audio has problems outputting digital audio over HDMI. This was especially evident when playing 1080p content.

I haven't tried using setting XBMC to digital and using S/PDIF to my receiver instead of HDMI, since I don't have my surround speakers setup yet.

[mutenroid]

I tried this possibility, but i obtained the same result.

In the main log of XBMC i extracted always the same sentence...

"WARNING: CDVDVideoCodecFFmpeg:ecode - avcodec_decode_video didn't consume the full packet. size: XXXX, consumed: 0"

[nathanashton]

I was able to eliminate my dropped frame issue by changing the audio output in XBMC from digital to analog. It seems my onboard audio has problems outputting digital audio over HDMI. This was especially evident when playing 1080p content.

I haven't tried using setting XBMC to digital and using S/PDIF to my receiver instead of HDMI, since I don't have my surround speakers setup yet.

Changing audio to analog helped me out a bit also.

I've heard some people are having good results using Vista?

Should I give this a try?

[mach170]

I haven't tried Vista.

Here's what I'm running:

XBMC Atlantis from the homepage download
Windows XP Pro SP3
Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ (3.0 Ghz)
1 GB DDR 2 800 Mhz Ram (2x 512 running Dual Channel) (Video card is using 256MB shared, so only 768 MB for Windows)
ATI Radeon x1250 (Onboard with latest drivers)
Realtek ALC889A Audio (Onboard)
Video/Audio out via HDMI

These are the settings changes I made to get 1080p studdering to stop:

Set Audio Output to: Analog
Set Render Method to: Advanced Shaders (GLSL)
Adjust refresh rate to: Enabled
Set High Quality Upscalling to: Enabled For SD Content
Video/Audio/DVD Cache - Harddisk to: 2048 kb

I think I may have also made some settings changes on my Audio drivers, but I'm not at home to check. I think I enabled Digital-only output, but don't think that was releated to the studdering. I think it was so it would send audio through the HDMI.

[mach170]

One more thing...

When running a 1080p movie with the above hardware/settings, I do still get about 20-30 skipped frames across a 2 hour movie (1 second worth of frames), which is completely unnoticable to me.

[Evanrich]

I can clearly see some dropped frames/stuttering even if the dropped frames counster is not changing.

I think it is the problem of the OPENGL renderer. It eigter needs to be improved in timing or there should be some other renderer used just for video playback.

Otherwise the software is really well designed and looks wonderfull.

This is why i donated hoping that video playback will be improved.

Then you donated to the wrong people, because playback is from ffmpeg, not xbmc....they just use ffmpeg...so go donate to them, not that donating to XBMC is not good, I plan on it as soon as a few more things are fixed

[mutenroid]

i have dropped frames with any type of config. Latest drivers, clean installation, everything ok.

Dropped frames continuosly, in a film like The Dark Knight (~14Gb MKV) very noticable in the first 2 minutes. With MPC-HC+(CoreAVC or FFDSHOW) travellings and pans plays without any problem