[Affejunge]

Let me start by saying the love the xbmc developers. They have made an open source project that rivals, and in many ways exceeds, any commercial offering. They continue to expand to new hardware and are always listening to their user-base and are constantly improving their product...

I have been a xbmc user since early 2010, coming from using MythTV since 2004 (uggh..how far we have come) At first pass I loved xbmc (vs myth). Customizable skins, video with backgrounds and scrapers to pull in info. It was light years ahead of Myth. And best of all, an excellent music player that plays my Hi-res audio at Hi-Res! No down-sampling! But there were problems.

You can search my posts about video play back. I have never gotten them resolved. Occasional frame-skips, especially with VDPAU enabled, have plague me from the start. I understand I am a video-phile. I understand my wife and kids think I am a freak because they cannot see what I am talking about. But I also know these artifacts are not exhibited on my blu-ray play...and to the point of this article, my $99 WD TV plus.

That is the rub. I have a computer with a video card that costs more than $99 and it is humbled by the WD player. 24hz playback on the WD is flawless. There are no sync issues and color is perfect, as is contrast.

I do not lay all the blame at the xbmc developers. As I said before, without irony, they are my heroes. I believe the main fault is with VDPAU. Through I have everything in my signal chain outputting limited (or low) RGB (avoid rounding errors) it is obvious there are problems with VDPAU's implementation of it. (Option "ColorSpace" "RGB";Option "ColorRange" "Limited")

Now, this is a tough choice. xbmc's interface BLOWS away the WD player. Plus, the WD player down-samples all audio to 48kHz. (and its interface is as ugly as sin)

Where do I go? I will keep my eye on VDPAU development. I will continue to use xbmc as my digital audio playback source...and will use it's UPNP server for video sources. But to watch video, I must use the WD player.

I am not trolling here...
Do you think I am crazy?
I would love to hear from xbmc developers: Is VDPAU lacking?

Good Night and Good Luck.

[darkscout]

VDPAU's biggest bug is related to PEBKAC.

[Affejunge]

VDPAU's biggest bug is related to PEBKAC.

Wow....

You don't know me at all and throw that one out.

I find it interesting that most linux user here (99%) use Ubuntu (or some variant) yet I moved off ubuntu 2 years ago since it was way too dumbed down...wizards for everything! And let's make sure our monolithic kernel supports everything!!! (yes, I am using gentoo now..but I am sure, by your account, my make.conf is all jacked....yet my 10 yo laptop is rock solid, even with gnome.....oh yeah...what's a blacklist for?! That's right, to prove you know nothing about compiling a kernel)

Look, I am sure I have just hosed this thread with my comment. I really did want an intelligent discussion, especially with developers.

I guess this is the best I will get from this forum....

[bossanova808]

I actually agree with the OP - for 2+ years now I have been struggling to get consistent, non skippy playback of typical 720p and 1080p interweb sourced materials and I think that it simply can't be done with XBMC and ION (VDPAU) - no amount of experimentation with drivers, LIVE, Openelec, Ubuntu minimal, xorg.conf, modelines etc etc can get it to be *consistently* perfect. Other players can play the same files without the little random skips, indeed XBMC can often play the same files without skips in the same areas if you rewind it back and give it another go. I suspect it's XBMC's syncing code as that's what usually goes wild in the CodecInfo display....

It's definitely NOT PEBKAC - if hard working, computer and video knowledgeable people with good equipment can't get it perfect, then it's simply too hard as it stands, for whatever reason.

The most consistent solution I have found is Openelec but as of RC5 it has some new frame dropping issue despite being largely perfectly smooth for other recent betas + RCs. I suspect it's the NVidia driver change of April 20th or so that f*cked it up and I hope the Openelec devs will take note of the thread on there forums and look into this issue....for a while there it was acceptably perfect really. But if not, one might either have to go back to an old beta (and thus miss other new developments) or - hardly user friendly - roll one's own openelec distribution...argh, it's so frustrating!

[Devaron]

Ah... the well-known frame-skipping (or jitter, judder, stutter) problem... It's really annoying isn't it? I have been tinkering with my setup to get rid of this problem too. I tried everything i read in the forums. The best i got was reducing the number of "judders" from once every 5-10 secs to once every minute or so.

I tried the many "hints" and "tips" that can be found throughout this (and other) forum(s). I tried updating or downgrading various drivers, editing Xorg.conf, or nvidia-settings, adjusting/adding modelines etc. It all had SOME effect, but i couldn't get rid of the problem entirely.

I didn't change the XBMC settings most of the time. I used VDPAU, had "adjust refresh to display" and "Sync to video" enabled and the method i used was Drop/dupe or Audio.

About 2 weeks ago i was adjusting some things again, and in the process decided to DISABLE the "Sync to video" setting while leaving the "adjust refresh to display" enabled.

And no more judders!!! Not with SD or HD material and on 60hz, 50hz, 30hz AND 24hz!!

Now i don't know if this works for you, or others who read this, but it might be a good idea if you try something out to test the result with this option enabled as well as disabled!

Good luck!

[deppan]

VDPAU's biggest bug is related to PEBKAC.

You're an ignorant moron.

I completely agree with the OP. xbmc+vdpau+ion is simply a broken combo.

See my thread about this: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=100938

[SpectreX]

The only pratical solution is to switch to Windows 7. XBMC 10.1 + DXVA 2.0 work fine out of the box.

[nicknacc]

i got a good processor with ati 5450, a LOT of my sd movies look like horseshit through xbmc, i dont have the space to download everything in hd. my wdtv made things look much better.

[PatrickVogeli]

I feel stupid right now... I have an Atom + ION combo and I'm happy with it: color and 24 Hz are OK. Missed frames I get some during the first 30secs after starting the movies, after that life is fine.

EDIT: oh, for those running linux, I suppose you already checked this post http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=70068

[Geeba]

Openelec RC1 on Zotac ID11 - from my eyes (which are a few years old granted) it looks perfect... no skiping, missed frames, jerkymess or jumping! and colour on my 40" Sammy LCD is also good... as it is on my Projector.

SD stuff I play on Xbox - which again seemed to work fantastically well with my LCD TV! looks dam good to me!



There are literary thousands of hardware/software combinations, (not something I was every very keen on but hey I come from XBMP/MC on Xbox and a single appliance approach I always thought was best) if its looking that bad maybe a change would help things out. Try Openelec, try a different GFX card etc.

[bobo1on1]

I don't want to criticize people's choices here but: ION systems are slow (compared to todays desktop machines), XBMC is a rather heavy application and 1080p is a very high resolution.

Combine those factors and you're running a corner case where a small loss in performance can have a big effect.

[Geeba]

I thought that was the idea of the ION setup... for 1080p and HD resolutions...

Low power consumption of Atom combined with GFX chip... dont really want my games rig running SLi etc under my TV to watch HD....

[vikjon0]

I think you need to remember that many of us is happy with the ION performance but perhaps for people with very high demands it is not always enough. Altough many of the unhappy people claims it worked perfect under version 9....

[branlr]

I think you need to remember that many of us is happy with the ION performance but perhaps for people with very high demands it is not always enough. Altough many of the unhappy people claims it worked perfect under version 9....

Hmmm... 9.11 babylon didn't have hardware acceleration at all, did it? or did it work with vdpau?

[TugboatBill]

I don't want to criticize people's choices here but: ION systems are slow (compared to todays desktop machines), XBMC is a rather heavy application and 1080p is a very high resolution.

Combine those factors and you're running a corner case where a small loss in performance can have a big effect.

I was under the impression the ION systems were the preferred platform to run XBMC under. If not, then what is?