[pennant]

I have the same problem. XBMC sucks at untouched blu-ray rips unless you use dsplayer on Windows, but even that can be buggy.

[Maconi]

I have the same problem. XBMC sucks at untouched blu-ray rips unless you use dsplayer on Windows, but even that can be buggy.

I've been having a LOT of trouble with the audio/video on my minimal Ubuntu standalone-XBMC install, and my audio/video are both Intel (which means there are no drivers, it's supposed to be built in) so it should be pretty simple.

I'm probably gonna make the switch to Windows and DSPlayer soon to see if that makes a difference as well.

[MrCarbo]

I have the same problem. XBMC sucks at untouched blu-ray rips unless you use dsplayer on Windows, but even that can be buggy.

So why are lots of people telling me it should work without a problem and why does the killa sample not work properly. Does that killa sample work for you?

[Hannes The Hun]

I've been having a LOT of trouble with the audio/video on my minimal Ubuntu standalone-XBMC install, and my audio/video are both Intel (which means there are no drivers, it's supposed to be built in) so it should be pretty simple.

wait, what?

[MrCarbo]

Can I ask a related question... I see that people do successfully run Windows 7 on the R3610, in fact you can choose to buy it with W7 already installed. I didn't, I got the Linux version. I removed the version of linux that came with it as I knew it was not suitable so I've no idea how it performed, but I have installed Ubuntu 10.04 on it and it doesn't perform well at all. The mouse seems laggy, the whole OS seems a bit laggy. Opening a window seems a bit slow. If that's how it is with an R3610 then how the heck are people running windows 7 "happily" ? Maybe they've got 4GB RAM in their R3610 for W7?

Hell, I even installed nasty Boxee on it to see if that could play avatar or the killa sample... I never got as far as playing any media because as soon as I launched boxee the whole thing became unusable... you've got to enter your username... took 5 minutes to type my name... yet I know people are using boxee with the very same set up, ie ubunto 10.04 typical install on R3610.

[neil.j1983]

i run eventghost as shell. the only apps it runs is:

eventghost which launches:

ps3remotemanager
dvd43
xbmc

[pennant]

So why are lots of people telling me it should work without a problem and why does the killa sample not work properly. Does that killa sample work for you?

I don't have my Linux install anymore so I can't try it again. I found it to be a poor test because it's so short. It stutters at the beginning (all of my videos stutter at the beginning and I was told that is normal) and then the video is practically over.

Might be interesting to see your debug log for the killa sample. I noticed you get tons of "ERROR: ffmpeg[AB8BFB70]: [h264_vdpau] non-existing SPS 1 referenced in buffering period" in your Avatar rip log. I'd be interested to see if those who claim that they can play the rip perfectly get those as well.

[Vankwish]

//Long Post//

I bought my first Revo as a win 7 machine. I it ran 7 well (I cant recall the index score) but it did everything I needed from it. Web browsing, emails, office docs, playing music and videos (MPC & VLC) the only thing it let me down with was HD flash. That was better with the adobe update though . . .

When I installed XBMC for win 7 I was happy with the performance for the most part but with the updates/indexing/av scans running in the background, performance suffered. Also with sab and sickbeard running in the background it was just too much

Then I tried an xbmc live. The performance difference was VERY noticeable, menus were more responsive, start up time was much faster and was easier for the "house" to use.

I decided that we have enough laptops in the house already so I sacrificed the the win 7 install to install XBMC-Live to HDD. (the Revo didn't do anything better than any of the laptops we have).

After installing XBMC-Live to the HDD i have had a play around with sab and sickbeard again. These run in the background now and I honestly can't notice any performance degradation in XBMC. I could par and un-rar huge files whilst playing my blu-ray rips (albeit over Ethernet, it did negatively affect performance when playing off the local drive whilst paring/unpacking) I had a read around and discovered that my Revo had a slow 5400 rpm HDD and people had noticed improvements upgrading the HDD to faster models, so i bought a cheap SSD, and this fixed it!

So much was I impressed with its performance i bought another, this time the Linux flavour though (i deleted the recovery partition, flashed the linux bios and peeled the win 7 cert off the first Revo - I'm that damn happy with XBMC Linux on these!)

//Short Story//

It sounds to me like you *might* have faulty hardware . . . (obviously I cant rule out everything, I wouldn't know where to start!)

::EDIT::

This post sounded too much like a sales pitch so I should just add that a family member has since bout a cheaper single core ION system which I set up in the same manner and they too have the same capability.

[pennant]

I don't think it's a hardware issue. I have an ION system and a system with an AMD CPU and NVIDIA GT 240. Both can't play an Avatar rip correctly.

I Googled and found a thread where someone is having the same problem, except with Mplayer: http://readlist.com/lists/mplayerhq.hu/m...21397.html

I have no problem with the Avatar rip under Windows and a DirectShow player (DSPlayer, MPC-HC, MediaPortal).

[MrCarbo]

//Long Post//

I bought my first Revo as a win 7 machine. I it ran 7 well (I cant recall the index score) but it did everything I needed from it. Web browsing, emails, office docs, playing music and videos (MPC & VLC) the only thing it let me down with was HD flash. That was better with the adobe update though . . .

When I installed XBMC for win 7 I was happy with the performance for the most part but with the updates/indexing/av scans running in the background, performance suffered. Also with sab and sickbeard running in the background it was just too much

Then I tried an xbmc live. The performance difference was VERY noticeable, menus were more responsive, start up time was much faster and was easier for the "house" to use.

I decided that we have enough laptops in the house already so I sacrificed the the win 7 install to install XBMC-Live to HDD. (the Revo didn't do anything better than any of the laptops we have).

After installing XBMC-Live to the HDD i have had a play around with sab and sickbeard again. These run in the background now and I honestly can't notice any performance degradation in XBMC. I could par and un-rar huge files whilst playing my blu-ray rips (albeit over Ethernet, it did negatively affect performance when playing off the local drive whilst paring/unpacking) I had a read around and discovered that my Revo had a slow 5400 rpm HDD and people had noticed improvements upgrading the HDD to faster models, so i bought a cheap SSD, and this fixed it!

So much was I impressed with its performance i bought another, this time the Linux flavour though (i deleted the recovery partition, flashed the linux bios and peeled the win 7 cert off the first Revo - I'm that damn happy with XBMC Linux on these!)

//Short Story//

It sounds to me like you *might* have faulty hardware . . . (obviously I cant rule out everything, I wouldn't know where to start!)

::EDIT::

This post sounded too much like a sales pitch so I should just add that a family member has since bout a cheaper single core ION system which I set up in the same manner and they too have the same capability.

Thanks for the info.

I can't imagine my revo running w7 nicely at all; it struggles with linux ubuntu!

I've got a work collegue who also has a Revo 3610 with 2GB RAM. He doesn't use XBMC; just uses windows 7 on it and whatever media player he uses. That solution would be no good to me at the moment as the wife and kids need to be able to use it and they're comfortable with xbmc. Anyway, he reckons he's never had a problem. Having said that, the biggest files he's used are 15GB, so they're probably not 25Mb/s fellas.

Anyway, he's going to let me borrow it for a day or so and I'll see then whether my revo is faulty.

In theory I should be able to boot up from the current Live CD, select nvidia and play the killa sample with no issues. If I can do that with his revo but not with mine then I'll be getting a replacement!

Thanks for all your help.. I'll post back here in a couple of days when I've tested the 2nd revo.

[MrCarbo]

I don't think it's a hardware issue. I have an ION system and a system with an AMD CPU and NVIDIA GT 240. Both can't play an Avatar rip correctly.

I Googled and found a thread where someone is having the same problem, except with Mplayer: http://readlist.com/lists/mplayerhq.hu/m...21397.html

I have no problem with the Avatar rip under Windows and a DirectShow player (DSPlayer, MPC-HC, MediaPortal).

I can't play the killa sample correctly either. But the clip is so short it's hard to say whether it would improve after the initial seconds... so putting that to one side....

I do have other PCs in the house, one of them is an old P4 3ghz and that can't even handle any HD in xbmc windows. The other 2 are a Q9550 and an i7-860, both of them have ATi 4760 cards and both of them can handle the avatar rip and killa sample in either Linux Live (obviously no HW acceleration) and in windows - I'm not sure if the windows one had hardware acceleration enabled or not (dxva).

If this other Revo I'm borrowing exhibits the same problems in Live/Linux I will also try latest svn of windows xbmc with dxva enabled and see if that works. If neither work then it's a limitation of revo and I'll accept that and make sure all my rips are re-encoded down to 15Mb/s or thereabouts, which is good enough anyway I think.

My 15Mb/s Indiana Jones rips work fine, so it appears to be the bitrate that's killing it. I was just hoping to be able to avoid the re-encode process for blurays as it takes hours, much easier/quicker to just use makemkv and remove the streams I don't want and preserve everything else. The amount of storage doesn't bother me yet either as I'll probably not have many blurays for a while and I can always add another 1TB/2TB drive and then eventually purge off things that I or the kids don't want any more.

[Vankwish]

FWIW I see a higher cpu utilisation when playing the killer sample than I do with playing my avatar blu-ray rip (or any of my other blu-ray rips for that matter). Also my Revo's have no problem with bitrates much higher the 15.

P.S. don't forget to set the shared memory to 512 in the bios on the test revo you are borrowing!

[GJones]

Maybe a wrong path but it's worth checking out: where is the movie stored? Is it on an eSATA disk? What filesystem is on the attached disk? Is it on a network share? If so, how is the Revo connected to the network?

[>>X<<]

I'm running XP and DSPlayer on an Asrock 330, killa sample is as smooth as butter using either DXVA or CoreAVC/CUDA which its currently using tried live didn't notice much if any difference in the GUI

[Vankwish]

I found this in the howto section . . .

Pitfall 8: Video judder!
Oh the agony! I've read so many posts about this problem. The Revo is running along at low CPU and then randomly the video jerks for a few seconds before returning to normal. The logs show nothing. Frustration sets in and you start to convince yourself that the Revo is too modest a hardware platform to playback HD correctly, you consider upgrading the RAM, you consider chucking it out the window, etc. Well, take heart, I assure you that it is fully capable.

This one was by far the hardest one to solve and everyone's situation is slightly different. Here are the changes that helped me:

1. Start by using this guide. The first one is definitely more straight-forward, so USE IT FIRST. If you have problems after trying everything in that thread, this guide was also helpful. If you use the second link, ensure that you follow the step involving this code:
   Code:

   X -verbose 6 > ~/xlog.txt  2>&1
   There is other advice suggesting you use the gtf command to generate the modelines required for your xorg.conf file as opposed to the code above. What I found is that the gtf results were not the same as the result from the verbose command, and they did not work as well. YMMV, but that was my experience.
   
2. Refresh rate for 24Hz modes. The results of the verbose command above for me returned supported refresh rate ranges that indicated my projector and receiver did not support 24Hz when I know for a fact they do. I had to manually adjust the range in my xorg.conf to make it appear that 24hz was supported. Be careful on this step as it is possible to damage your display if you do this wrong. I can only say it worked for me.
   
3. The xorg.conf file - a file full of pitfalls! (note that you should not copy this exactly, but I will call out the commands below that were most critical in getting my setup working smoothly. Anything in blue is likely going to be unique to your display and you should change using the data output from the verbose logging command used above.
   
   In the section below, any line beginning with '#' is a comment added for explanation. I also added comments in brackets []. Anything inside [] MUST be removed in your file for it to work correctly. Finally, note that this is only the monitor section through the end of the file. There are obviously other non-display related sections of xorg.conf that I've left out of this to save space.
   
   Also, here is a link to the reference on all of the xorg.conf options and what they do. If you are making changes to the xorg.conf file, it is worth reading this just to understand what you are changing and the effect it should have. One final suggestion on this file. If you find yourself following all of these recommendations and still having problems, make changes to the options one at a time and determine whether they make any difference to your problem. Changing multiple things at a time makes it impossible to tell what is helping and what might be making the problem worse.
   
   
   Code:

   Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Monitor0"
[color=blue]    VendorName     "DON"
    ModelName      "DON DENON-AVAMP"
    HorizSync       15.0 - 92.0
    VertRefresh     24.0 - 85.0 [line above manually changed to support 24hz refresh rates][/color]
    
    Option         "DPMS" "FALSE" [turns off power saving features]

    Option         "ExactModeTimingsDVI" "TRUE" [see note below]
    Option         "UseEDIDFreqs" "FALSE"  [see note below]
# The two items above were required in my setup, [b]but don't enable them
# unless you have problems getting XBMC
# to select the right refresh rate.[/b]

[color=blue]Modeline "1920x1080@24p-Denon" 74.16 1920 2558 2602 2750 1080 1084 1089 1125 +hsync +vsync
Modeline "1920x1080@60p-Denon" 148.50 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1084 1089 1125 +hsync +vsync
Modeline "1920x1080@60i-Denon" 74.18 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1084 1094 1124 +hsync +vsync Interlace[/color]

EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "ION"
#   Option         "NoFlip" "True"
# NoFlip is another option you can try as a last resort to eliminate
# judder, but it is known to cause significant tearing.  I tried using this,
# but ultimately disabled it because it caused so much tearing

EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Device0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "NoLogo" "True"
    Option         "TwinView" "0"
    Option         "DynamicTwinView" "false" [required in my setup]
    Option         "FlatPanelProperties" "Scaling = Native" [required in my setup]
    Option         "ModeValidation" "NoEdidModes" [required in my setup]
[b]# This is another one you should not enable by default
# unless you have problems getting the right refresh rate in XBMC.
[/b]

    Option         "TripleBuffer" "false"
#[b][MADE A HUGE DIFFERENCE in eliminating judder.
#Don't forget to try this one if you have problems!][/b]

    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24

[color=blue]    Modes "1920x1080@24p-Denon" "1920x1080@60p-Denon" "1920x1080@60i-Denon"
    #Modes above must match the names you create for your modes in the 'monitor' section[/color]
    
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
    Option         "Composite" "Disable" [recommended to reduce tearing]
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
        Device          "Configured Video Device"
EndSection
   Update: Items 4 & 5 immediately below were added on 02-03-2010.
   
4. DTS-MA HD audio tracks - If you rip your BluRays and keep the DTS-MA track, I've found that XBMC often hiccups on extracting the core audio from the DTS-MA track, and it creates ugly jerks in the video. The solution here is simple. When you rip your BluRays, down-convert the audio to DTS core and don't rely on XBMC to extract the core for you while playing. Ideally I would have liked to have kept the DTS-HD stream untouched, but given this observation, it's not worth it. You could also keep a duplicate copy of the DTS-HD audio in the file for future-proofing, just make sure that the DTS standard track is the one selected by default in XBMC.
   
5. Incorrect deinterlacing - This affected only a couple of my rips. The primary example is Rush - Snakes & Arrows on BluRay. This was shot in 1080i as opposed to 1080p like every other BluRay I have. XBMC for whatever reason does not correctly identify the stream as interlaced and you have to manually open up the video menu while playing and choose "interlace" as opposed to the default option there. This has affected 1-2 other rips (Harvard Beats Yale BluRay), but not many fall into this category.
   
6. Continued video judder even after fiddling with xorg.conf to the nth degree and following the advice above, if you installed on top of Ubuntu like I did, then you likely still have this problem. The last piece of the solution for me was adding the xbmc-standalone package from the repository. (sudo apt-get install xbmc-standalone) There is also some information in this thread about how to log into the XBMC session once it is installed if you don't figure it out immediately.
   
   For me, the combination of the xorg.conf file above and moving to xbmc-standalone finally solved 99% of judder/jerky video issues. Also double-check that you are not playing the DTS-MA tracks (#4 under judder above) if you aren't getting smooth video. Once you get it playing smoothly, it is a beautiful thing. Hopefully these two tips work for you as well.
   
7. XBMC video-related settings: There is some personal preference here, but this is how I have my settings currently:
   • Vertical Blank Sync - let driver choose
     
   • Adjust refresh rate to match video - On
     
   • Sync playback to display - On
     
   • A/V Sync method - Drop/dupe audio
     
   • Deinterlace settings - Auto (note #5 above under judder, sometimes this has to be forced)

Not sure if its what your describing, perhaps you should check the thread out?

@>>X<<

TBH the biggest improvement I found in the GUI was the addition of a SSD to my Revo, how do you find xbmc on xp generally? I only tried it with win 7.