Kodi Community Forum

I realize that desktop based HTPCs are out of fashion today but my Kodi machine is an i7 3770K machine overclocked to 4.3ghz with a Radeon HD 7950 on it. It pulls double duty as the home theater machine and as a games machine with Steam Big Picture Mode. Two weeks ago I picked up a Samsung 4K 65" UHD TV and even with my somewhat older hardware, it only took a DisplayPort 1.2a to HDMI 2.1a adaptor to get 4K@60hz output of it. I always liked this box because when it came to software decoding it could handle everything. I previously did a thread asking about Kodi's inefficiency with HEVC 60hz videos, all my files on hand for testing just buried the needle and the answer we came to was simple: The Windows port of Kodi is 32bit and 32bit FFMPEG is massively inefficient at the task. 64bit programs using 64bit FFMPEG have no issue. But this was all purely academic and for all my 24-30fps things the 3770K seemed to be powerful enough.

And then last night day I had a real file, not some benchmark for tinkering, and Kodi couldn't keep up. What I'd never tested was a really aggressively encoded HEVC Main10 encode but I encountered that with a copy of The Grand Tour. Kodi hit a wall. Kodi was just kissing that wall, it barely dropped any frames but was often 200-300ms behind on the audio and it never could 'quite' get it to sync up. The CPU just couldn't quite keep up using the 32bit build FFMPEG at the heart of Kodi. And I'm just a bit disappointed. Not in Kodi or the Devs, but in this box that till last night, ate everything that was thrown at it. A Shield Android TV would have played that file without any problems even but this big fat Wintel box wasn't up to task.

I get the problem, it's that Kodi's 64bit windows build is not a high priority and even HEVC 4K content is not frequently encountered yet for those who would be using a Wintel Kodi machine without hardware decoding. I understand the current solutions that I could take today: A new CPU with hardware decoding or a new GPU with hardware decoding. Well, that or finding more processing power, my six core i7 4930K at 4.6ghz desktop was up to the task but that is a huge CPU to use for Kodi. I can hope for the Windows build of Kodi to go 64bit but I understand that there's obviously more pressing issues and a lot of builds and features to maintain.

It just kinda sucks, you know?

We actually have more active, "full time" Windows devs than Android devs. I imagine if you provide a paxxi and afedchin a debug log playing back your file, they'd be happy to take a look at what's happening.

(2016-11-23, 05:01)natethomas Wrote: [ -> ]We actually have more active, "full time" Windows devs than Android devs. I imagine if you provide a paxxi and afedchin a debug log playing back your file, they'd be happy to take a look at what's happening.

It's not that I'm unwilling to provide a debug log but I'm not sure what it would actually accomplish. We did the thread finding the problem already where discussing with some devs we found the root:

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=277724

It's that Kodi is 32bit and thus using a 32bit build of FFMPEG. We were able to replicate the issue switching between 32bit and 64bit builds of other software that also make use of FFMPEG. The issue is not present on other builds of Kodi where they are 64bit. There's nothing to 'debug' on my issue, the cause is pretty clear, it's just that the limitations of a 32bit FFMPEG don't show themselves until you start throwing very complicated, high resolution, HEVC files at FFMPEG. I can't even make the issue nearly as apparent with similarly encoded 1080p HEVC encodes.

But of course, these kind of files, while increasing in commonality, are fairly few and far between now, so I get that it's not a pressing issue.

I know it's just a temporary workaround, but booting LibreElec from USB-Stick would probably also fix your issue for the time being, until the 64bit Windows version is finished. A USB stick is a lot cheaper than a new gaming rig or GPU

Try playing that file with Media Player Classic HC-x64 and install it with a rule for only those files that require it. External players (wiki) this work-around will last for a bit of time.

I appreciate the work arounds but hey involve a bit more re-working of my Kodi box. At the time, I feel the best player is to use the TV, since it's a Smart TV I can sent from Kodi to the TV over UPNP and the TV itself has no problem with the content. That said, hopefully in a few weeks Amazon Prime Video comes to Canada and I can check it out in HDR.

(2016-11-23, 11:09)da-anda Wrote: [ -> ]I know it's just a temporary workaround, but booting LibreElec from USB-Stick would probably also fix your issue for the time being, until the 64bit Windows version is finished. A USB stick is a lot cheaper than a new gaming rig or GPU

This would be good news, if Kodi for Windows is going for 64 bit, would be good for some official announcement so users are aware.

Looking at the Steam hardware survey which should be good information for the type of users that run Kodi, 64 bit Windows 7/8/10 is about 87% of users, so most would be OK to move straight to 64 the rest probably would just need to upgrade Windows, with a few on old hardware or old Atom CPU's that are 32 bit only.