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kricker
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Have you tried without an advanced setting file? I see you have many other options set in there.
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Haven't tried it without the advancedsettings.xml (special://profile/advancedsettings.xml), but the only things I set in there is a 200ms delay for 24fps movies, the sorting in the music library and the alwayontop-Option. But I see in the logs there's a second advancedsettings.xml (special://xbmc/system/advancedsettings.xml), do you mean that one? Is this file supposed to be there or might this be a leftover from a patched version of the Eden beta (with HD audio) I tried back then?
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kricker
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Hmm possibly a GPU or GPU driver issue. Does it send the audio over HDMI as well? If so, can you tell it to only send video and see what happens. When the TV is hooked up, which display is the primary? You probably need the TV set to primary and have the laptop screen not mirroring.
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My seutup: laptop -> HDMI (video + audio) -> Denon AVR -> HDMI (video) -> TV
As long as only the AVR is switched on, the laptop display is used, as soon as I switch on the TV, the laptop display is deactivated. There's no mirroring or multi-display active.
So I tried different settings:
- deactivating the hdmi audio in the nvidia control panel -> no change
- switching on A/V synch (video clock) in XBMC -> no change
- switching off adjust display refresh rate in XBMC -> seems to work fine for DVD-Content, BD-Content with micro-stutters
Since you suspected a driver issue i reverted my nvidia driver back to a version from my laptop vendor, which is dated end of 2010. I didn't have the time to do excessiv test yet, but it seems the 1-2 frames dropped per second after ~30 minutes of playtime for DVD-Content is gone. After ~1h of playtime there was a total of 12 frames dropped, which is a big improvement so far. I will make further tests with different content types, to see if I can stay on this driver version or problems occure somewhere else.
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kricker
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Also try going straight to the TV bypassing the AVR, just to make sure it isn't causing any sort of issue.
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I did do quite a few test now, switching back and forth different driver versions (incl. complete deinstallation of the drivers) and ended up with the newest version of nvidia (301.42). But I couldn't get a perfect playback setup so far. At this point I have the following problems:
- when I turn off 'adjust display refresh rate' the overall playback just isn't smooth (for 25fps SD content and 23.976fps HD content), but there're no framedrops at all
- with turned on 'adjust display refresh rate' the overall SD content playback is smooth, but from time to time I get short stutters (no framedrops), especially in sections with slow/little movement. If I skip back 30 seconds right after I encountered one of those stuttering moments, then there's no stuttering, so it's not really reproducable.
- with turned on 'adjust display refresh rate' the overall HD content playback is smooth, but I get framedrops ~ 40-50 per movie. With the movies I watched so far I would say max. 10 out of those 40-50 were visible per movie, but still it is annoying.
I also tried connecting directly to the TV, I switched to 'High Performance' in Windows energy settings, but that didn't change anything at all. Any further suggestions on how to get rid of those playback flaws?
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kricker
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Have you experimented with the "sync playback to display" settings?
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Haven't done that yet, since I thought this would only be a good option if the display has a fixed framerate and adjusting the display to fit the framerate of the movie would be the way to go to get a perfect playback. My TV has no problems with displaying those framerates, if I play those movies from the PS3 playback is super smooth.
But I'll give it a try, is there any particular configuration that I should start with?
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kricker
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I think you are right about that. Unfortunately my TV doesn't tell me the frame-rate it is running at, so I've never really got to test this out fully. It may do nothing for you, but I figure it is worth a shot. The only time I see some slight studdering is when watching Swamp People on the long panning shots, and I think that has more to do with the files themselves than XBMC's playback.
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So, for now it seems I did find a working solution. I activated "sync playback to screen" with the audio resample option. With that the occasional framedrops in HD content was gone and I did not came across any microstuttering in SD content. After a while i realised that some files (HD and SD) just start to drop frames every 10 seconds, I then deactivated deinterlacing and everything was smooth. I didn't come across any flaws in playback with that setup for some time now, so hopefully this is the solution.
Just wanted to share, in case someone is experiencing similar playback problems.