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idioteque · (This post was last modified: 2010-08-27, 10:02 by idioteque.)

After careful investigation i come to the conclusion that with my mac mini late 2009 there is also something weird going on.

I always thought that I had smooth playback until I begane to pay close attention to it.
Before I just looked at the frames dropped and that is/was always less that 4-5. These are dropped during the startup of the movie.

Just now I played a movie and enabled "codec info" for about 30 minutes of watching the movie and I noticed that there are no frame drops, but when I notices a kind of stutter the fps drops from an about 24 to about 14-17 .

This is just a fraction of a second, after dropping to 14-17 it speeds up to 30 to level at 24 again, is under half a second.

This does not happen very often, say 2-3 times in the 30 minutes of playback I notices so it is very hard to notice if you dont pay close attention to it.

Is this the problem you are referring to, D-tyme ?I think it is the same problem

Setup:

XBMC SVN 33147
OSX 10.6.4 with all patches, including graphic update
Panasonic 42PG20ES, 60 Hz overscan enabled Full HD

In XBMC sync is allways on als VDA
no framerate adjustments enabled

The files I played are MKV and AVI.

the MKV is played with VDA, de AVI ins not.

Here is a log of the MKV being played. The strange thing is that the log is not completely written.

http://pastebin.com/ur91HrGP

Screenshot of crashing debug log:
http://skitch.com/idioteque/du7j7/xbmc.log

The movie plays on for a whole hour but stuff is being written to the debug log only not something the console can read. The filesize increases, and the timestamp also is updated

davilla · 2010-08-28, 19:08

I keep telling users that 10.6.4 is borked with respect to VDA. No one listens Smile

That's fine. A 10.6.5 update is brewing. Maybe that will fix it and those that insist on running the absolute latest updates will get relief.

ix400 · 2010-08-28, 20:02

... does Apple know that there is a problem?

Cheers,

Chris

ix400 · 2010-08-29, 00:04

I used makemkv to extract the m2ts from the Terminator Salvation BD. Playback with XBMC was very smooth when I was still running OS X 10.6.3 (with and without hardware accelaration). It also played smoothly with Plex.

After upgrading to 10.6.4, playback of exactly the same file is very choppy with XBMC (with and without hardware accelaration). But it plays still smoothly in Plex.

Installing the beta of 10.6.5 (build H531) does not make a difference, it's still choppy with xbmc.

I don't think that the problem will be fixed in the final 10.6.5 release.

Where do the differences between Plex and XBMC come from? The Plex version I'm using doesn't even know hardware accelaration, but even the highest bitrate mkvs play very smoothly.

My setup: Mac Mini 2010, 2.66 GHz, 8GB RAM

Any ideas?

Chris

davilla · 2010-08-29, 01:15

ix400 Wrote:I used makemkv to extract the m2ts from the Terminator Salvation BD. Playback with XBMC was very smooth when I was still running OS X 10.6.3 (with and without hardware accelaration). It also played smoothly with Plex.

After upgrading to 10.6.4, playback of exactly the same file is very choppy with XBMC (with and without hardware accelaration). But it plays still smoothly in Plex.

Installing the beta of 10.6.5 (build H531) does not make a difference, it's still choppy with xbmc.

I don't think that the problem will be fixed in the final 10.6.5 release.

Where do the differences between Plex and XBMC come from? The Plex version I'm using doesn't even know hardware accelaration, but even the highest bitrate mkvs play very smoothly.

My setup: Mac Mini 2010, 2.66 GHz, 8GB RAM

Any ideas?

Chris

Plex uses an old version of ffmpeg, an even older implementation of XBMC's internal player. Don't compare it to XBMC even though it's a fork. The fork was two years ago and they are not even close.

What you think is smooth in Plex is really a down graded decoding at the benefit of speed. That version of ffmepg had a bug that skipped inloop deblocking for h.264. Our version does not do that anymore.

Your question is answered "Playback with XBMC was very smooth when I was still running OS X 10.6.3", and "After upgrading to 10.6.4, playback of exactly the same file is very choppy with XBMC". Ergo, there's some thing wacky with 10.6.4. What else can I say ? I can't reproduce on my MacBook with nvidia chipset running 10.6.4.

jmarshall · 2010-08-29, 03:37

If it's not using HW acceleration, then clearly it's not going to have a problem as the problem only exists with the VDA decoder on 10.6.4+.

Turn off the VDA decoder and XBMC will use software decoding just fine.

ix400 · 2010-08-29, 06:03

jmarshall Wrote:If it's not using HW acceleration, then clearly it's not going to have a problem as the problem only exists with the VDA decoder on 10.6.4+.

Turn off the VDA decoder and XBMC will use software decoding just fine.

... but with 10.6.4 (and 10.6.5 10H531) even software decoding is choppy, which it was not with 10.6.3.

May it's not only an VDA problem.

Can I generate a logfile during playback? Maybe that would help to get an answer.

Chris

davilla · 2010-08-29, 06:12

ix400 Wrote:... but with 10.6.4 (and 10.6.5 10H531) even software decoding is choppy, which it was not with 10.6.3.

May it's not only an VDA problem.

Can I generate a logfile during playback? Maybe that would help to get an answer.

Chris

xbmc always make a new xbmc.log file on startup. I've looks at those but nothing stands out.

ix400 · 2010-09-04, 18:16

davilla Wrote:Plex uses an old version of ffmpeg, an even older implementation of XBMC's internal player. Don't compare it to XBMC even though it's a fork. The fork was two years ago and they are not even close.

What you think is smooth in Plex is really a down graded decoding at the benefit of speed. That version of ffmepg had a bug that skipped inloop deblocking for h.264. Our version does not do that anymore.

Your question is answered "Playback with XBMC was very smooth when I was still running OS X 10.6.3", and "After upgrading to 10.6.4, playback of exactly the same file is very choppy with XBMC". Ergo, there's some thing wacky with 10.6.4. What else can I say ? I can't reproduce on my MacBook with nvidia chipset running 10.6.4.

... I have installed the new 10.6.5 beta (10H535). The problem still persists.

davilla, do you have access to a mac mini 2010?

Cheers,

Chris

davilla · 2010-09-04, 19:33

ix400 Wrote:... I have installed the new 10.6.5 beta (10H535). The problem still persists.

davilla, do you have access to a mac mini 2010?

Cheers,

Chris

I have a loaner coming now.

ix400 · 2010-09-04, 19:47

davilla Wrote:I have a loaner coming now.

Great.

Chris

ix400 · (This post was last modified: 2010-09-05, 08:07 by ix400.)

ix400 Wrote:... I have installed the new 10.6.5 beta (10H535). The problem still persists.

davilla, do you have access to a mac mini 2010?

Cheers,

Chris

... just for clarifaction what I meant / what I have observed:

Mac Mini 2010, 8GB RAM, 2,66 GHz, Dharma Beta (31.08.2010):

In every Mac OS X build above 10.6.3 Hardware acclearation is completely unusable (choppy playback). It works on 10.6.3.

On 10.6.4 and the beta builds of 10.6.5, software playback of mkvs derived from BDs is nice and fluent. So far I only found one exception, namely the Terminator Salvation mkv, which is derived from the BD (german version) by using makemkv. The file contains english and german audio as well as the corresponding subs. However, software playback of that file was nice and fluent with 10.6.3.

I think there is more behind that than 'just' the VDA related problem, and presumably it will not be fixed in the final 10.6.5.

@davilla: Do you need more information on that problem? Shall I try something out?

Cheers,

Chris

davilla · 2010-09-05, 17:24

no, once the new macmini comes it and I can reproduce the issue, it will get resolved.

ix400 · (This post was last modified: 2010-09-09, 21:41 by ix400.)

davilla Wrote:no, once the new macmini comes it and I can reproduce the issue, it will get resolved.

... did you already get the mini?

btw, i found a second mkv muxed from a BD that can't be properly played with dharma+mac mini 2010: Astronaut Farmer.

Playback is very choppy, even with HW accelaration enabled.

Plays smoothly in Plex .9

Cheers,

Chris

davilla · 2010-09-09, 15:22

ix400 Wrote:... did you already get the mini?

btw, i found a second mkv muxed from a BD that can't be properly played with dharma+mac mini 2010: Astronaut Farmer.

Playback is very choppy, even with now HW accelaration enabled.

Plays smoothly in Plex .9

Cheers,

Chris

Please don't mention Plex .9 or other media player that might be able to play this content. I don't dev for them and the issue is with XBMC playback. "Work the problem" as my father always said.

No new macmini yet. Sad