[sailingboy]

hi,

i'm relatively new the xbmc scene. i tried it on older hardware and liked it (despite no HD), and recently bought the zbox hd-id11. i'm not sure if this is the appropriate place to post, rather than the hardware discussion, but i need help, and i'm out of the few ideas i had. other users with this hardware don't experience this problem and thus offer no solutions in other parts of the forums. please, any help is appreciated.

what i did:
installed ubuntu 10.04.amd64
activated proprietary nvidia drivers
installed lirc support
installed xbmc using apt-get

problem i am having:
1080p (and even some SD) playback is not working well. i don't think the gpu is doing anything. 1080p bbc life sample plays along at about 12-15 fps. of the 4 logical cores all are at least 25% up to 60%, usually around 55%. the interesting thing is at first start the vq is about 20%-30% and aq is 99%, but after a little bit the aq slowly drops to 0% and starts stuttering and vg climbs up to 99%, but never more than 15 fps. after a little while the aq climbs back up and the vq drops back down, it seems to oscillate. changing to forced vdpau does nothing, nor does any of the other render settings. it obvious has a high number of dropped frames.

audio is output over 1/8" stereo on jack on front and it produces sound
video is output via dvi to vga at 1920x1080 60Hz

on another note: can someone tell me (or point me to) what all the on screen information means during debug video playback. i have kind of a rough idea. the cpu % is obvious and the audio and video bit rates make sense too. but what exactly vq and aq are telling me, i'm not sure, for example. or acpu,vpu,dcpu

what i tried:
changing render from auto to vdpau
reinstalling xbmc

things i don't care about at the moment and haven't tested:
audio over spdif
audio over hdmi
video over hdmi
anything using wireless

there's been some discussion in the forum's about these devices. to throw in my two cents on debated issues: out of the box the fan just goes to full speed after a few minutes for no reason, almost like clock work. updating the bios via usb boot for dos works (although it took me a few tries). del is the key to get to bios settings. with the new bios, the fan is basically inaudible.

i'm going to try re installing ubuntu from scratch again and have it check the media. we'll see how that goes.

thanks for the help...

[harryzimm]

Hi, and welcome to the forum.

Sounds like graphics driver problem to me. Did you install from the nvidia vdpau ppa?
If you want to test your hardware, here is a decent guide using a minmal install (no desktop)

cheers

[sailingboy]

thanks,

i just activated them using the gui hardware w/e that is in ubutnu already, i didn't read any where about that being a bad (or good) idea and thought it would be ok.


thanks to the quick response i'll try a few more things before a reinstall. the nvida gui says driver version 195.36.24, so i'll try updating that with the instruction on the other page you gave me.

i'll let you know.

thanks for the help.

ps. is there any where in docs or something that details what all of that screen means i mentioned earlier?

[harryzimm]

I'm not really sure what the vq aq values are. I dont think they are causing the problem though, more like a symptom. When you have that screen up playing a 1080p movie, does it say vdpau anywhere?

do you have libvdpau-dev installed?

sudo apt-get install libvdpau-dev

cheers

[sailingboy]

i followed the instructions on that other page for updating graphics driver, with a few small modifications. the video seems to work wonderfully now. 1080p at frame rate with max 7% cpu usage. the nvidia gui is gone, but i don't really care about that.

yeah i didn't think that was a problem, just a symptom, i thought it was audio and video quality, but now i think it's a buffer value. i just wanted to know what all those values meant to try and gain a better understanding. is there some where that would document these?

i don't think it says vdpau there, but i have that as the render method and it seems to work.

thanks for the help...