[AppleTV] Apple TV with Crystal HD & XBMC Dharma RC2 crash or stutter during playback

konan · 2010-12-05 07:16

Upgraded yesterday from Beta2 to RC2 because did not hear anything particularly bad on this forum and almost immediately regretted it. What is going on Team XBMC? Are you rushing for the Christmas Delivery of the new shiny XBMC 10? Let me tell you that people who run XBMC on Apple TV definitely suffer from that rush. After Beta 2 each and every next release was only getting worse. And Davilla personally promised that the release will work however I just don't see it. No offense but it looks like those who submit the code don't test on AppleTV at all. I understand that I don't sound cool but it's just every time a disappointment once again. Once again I have to revert back to the older version. We should stop doing that.
Now I try to start a playback of an .MKV H.264 1080p DD 5.1 that Beta2 plays perfectly and instead RC2 crashes with the exit code 11. Have a look at the crash.log here: http://pastebin.com/PFbpXMxJ
After a couple of full reboots it stopped crashing and finally started playing the movie but it's not possible to watch because of the continuous stutter every 10-20 seconds. Reboots don't help it's a stable condition. Here is the log during the stuttering playback http://pastebin.com/szHdsE1q. Once again Beta 2 played this movie perfectly and I am going to have to revert back to Beta 2.

**davilla** · 2010-12-05 07:35

konan Wrote:Upgraded yesterday from Beta2 to RC2 because did not hear anything particularly bad on this forum and almost immediately regretted it. What is going on Team XBMC? Are you rushing for the Christmas Delivery of the new shiny XBMC 10? Let me tell you that people who run XBMC on Apple TV definitely suffer from that rush. After Beta 2 each and every next release was only getting worse. And Davilla personally promised that the release will work however I just don't see it. No offense but it looks like those who submit the code don't test on AppleTV at all. I understand that I don't sound cool but it's just every time a disappointment once again. Once again I have to revert back to the older version. We should stop doing that.
Now I try to start a playback of an .MKV H.264 1080p DD 5.1 that Beta2 plays perfectly and instead RC2 crashes with the exit code 11. Have a look at the crash.log here: http://pastebin.com/PFbpXMxJ
After a couple of full reboots it stopped crashing and finally started playing the movie but it's not possible to watch because of the continuous stutter every 10-20 seconds. Reboots don't help it's a stable condition. Here is the log during the stuttering playback http://pastebin.com/szHdsE1q. Once again Beta 2 played this movie perfectly and I am going to have to revert back to Beta 2.

your crashlog show some issue with retrieving a gui setting.

your xbmc.log shows playback NOT using crystalhd "WARNING: Decode - avcodec_decode_video didn't consume the full packet. size: 16400, consumed: 0", avcodec is ffmpeg decoder.

konan · 2010-12-05 07:59

davilla Wrote:your crashlog show some issue with retrieving a gui setting.

your xbmc.log shows playback NOT using crystalhd "WARNING: Decode - avcodec_decode_video didn't consume the full packet. size: 16400, consumed: 0", avcodec is ffmpeg decoder.

Well, that may explain the problem but does not explain how to fix it and why it happened after installing RC2 via the Launcher. In System/Video/Playback the option "use hardware acceleration CrystalHD" is on.

konan · 2010-12-05 20:15

I have reverted back to Beta 2 and the stuttering has gone.

The CrystalHD driver seems to adds up its two cents to stuttering too: with r174 the playback stutters much more than with r156.

Once again the combination Beta 2 + r156 is the most stable and best performing at this point but staying with it does not make much sense since there are other problems that have been solved in later XBMC releases and exists in Beta 2.

I really hope that there is still hope to improve on HD playback in XBMC before the final release. If anyone has any information on this please share.

wah924 · 2010-12-07 08:04

I did some quick test.
I have ATV (3.02) + BCM-015 + RC2 + R174.
On 720P video with avg bitrate > 5Mb/s, they stutters.
On 720P video with avg bitrate < 3Mb/s, they play fine.

In both cases, video will stutter at the beginning of the video.

I replaced R174 with R156 and the result is about the same.

Some poster in other threads claims that video performance is much better with Beta2. I remembered Beta2 had a video scaling problem where I understand only half the video information was displayed (http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=8247). Could that be the reason why HD videos with Beta2 do not stutter. That problem was later resolved in r34428.

konan · 2010-12-09 18:41

Here is the thing. You don't need CrystalHD to play 720p video on AppleTV. Its standard video + CPU is capable of playing 720p just fine. I can tell because I used to run XBMC on ATV long before CrystalHD was available.

Now we have CrystalHD and XBMC player is presumably much more efficient compared to earlier versions and we have even more problems. What does that tell you? Buggy code, not well tested, not fixed.

Another day I posted a log where apparently my ATV while running XBMC RC2 was not using CrystalHD at all (even though it was present and XBMC sees it) and it was stuttering on 1080p playback but not much. The ffdshow was used to decode h.264 and the CPU load was not higher than 60%. What does that tell me? The latest software XBMC based on is very efficient and probably it would be capable of playing 1080p (not the High profile of course) even without CrystalHD but the player code screws it up. I can not prove it since I have no skills developing and debugging on ATV platform but believe me I can smell the buggy code very well.

What I am trying to tell is that there is no proper testing of XBMC on certain platforms, in particular I can see that the ATV platforms suffers a lot from it.

druggo · 2010-12-09 22:07

I am experiencing somewhat the same, i updated to the latest svn just now, running r174 - its SD content thats causing the hangs for me, not Crystal HD content...

Im playing SD over the HTSP protocol, and using tvheadend to stream live tv...

xbmc.log
http://pastie.org/1363167

CrashReporter.txt
http://pastie.org/1363169

logan_x50 · 2010-12-10 13:59

druggo Wrote:I am experiencing somewhat the same, i updated to the latest svn just now, running r174 - its SD content thats causing the hangs for me, not Crystal HD content...

Im playing SD over the HTSP protocol, and using tvheadend to stream live tv...

xbmc.log
http://pastie.org/1363167

CrashReporter.txt
http://pastie.org/1363169

To add my two pennies

i also now have constant SD buffering (file formats avi, divx) Crystal HD content plays fine

ATV 0S+BCM70012+Dharma RC2+crystal 174+Powerline Adaptor 200mbps+SMB Share

**davilla** · 2010-12-10 17:12

druggo Wrote:I am experiencing somewhat the same, i updated to the latest svn just now, running r174 - its SD content thats causing the hangs for me, not Crystal HD content...

Im playing SD over the HTSP protocol, and using tvheadend to stream live tv...

xbmc.log
http://pastie.org/1363167

CrashReporter.txt
http://pastie.org/1363169

crashed in postproc-51-x86-osx.so, do you have an upscaler turned on ?

interceptor121 · 2010-12-12 02:12

Konan: what is your resolution set on the ATV? I found out that if you set it to 1080p the XBMC playback stutters but at 720p it plays much better let alone the picture quality also better in my case because of a higher quality upscaler in the TV
If you have your ATV at 1080p set it back to 720p and things will improve massively
Davilla: is there a way to have launcher force the resolution to 720p and reboot finder before launching XBMC so I can keep the ATV interface at 1080p for the rest?