[mayoradamwe]

Like many individuals on this forum, I'm having an issue with slow/lagging/stuttering video. It's not the worst lag I have ever seen, but the video stutters enough to make the movie unwatchable (even though the audio has no problems and sounds amazing). Unlike some other posts, however, I have run through the standard Windows HOW TO - Solve audio problems + video stutter (audio induced) post and have gone through all of the appropriate steps to try stopping the video stutter problem.

Recently, I was running XBMC directly on a custom box that I use as a media storage server. Deciding that I wanted to get my XBMC install off the server itself I installed XBMC onto a Lenovo Q190 running 64-bit Windows 8. I run HDMI from the q190 to my Onkyo TX-NR609 AVR and from there to my TV. This same setup worked great on my media server, but it's not working as well on this q190. Everything between the new q190 and the media server is hardwired, gigabit ethernet.

I worked through the How-to post with my media server when I was having troubles and it helped solve my problem. This time, no such luck. Steps I've taken so far:

• Removed Realtek High Def audio drivers
  
• Confirmed "exclusive" mode for audio
  
• Confirmed supported audio formats
  
• Changed audio to Analog 2.0 Directsound
  
• Disabled DXVA2 hardware acceleration
  

Here is the log of me opening XBMC, playing a few seconds of "The Avengers (2012).mkv", stopping/exiting. I didn't see anything terribly out of place that would lead me to believe there was an issue but I'm hoping I am wrong. I tried really hard to exhaust all possible corrections before posting because I didn't want to be another member posting the same problem for the 100th time.

If there is anything else I can do/provide that could help someone help determine what is causing this slight stutter please let me know.

Thanks in advance,
Justin

[bimme]

hi there.

did u enable "adjust display refreshrate to match video" ?

checking your log, dvdplayer recognises the different refreshrate of 23,976hz, but a few lines down, the display is still sitting at 59,9hz...

this will result in an 3:2 pulldown...

this pulldown lagging is driving me crazy... maybe this is the kind of stuttering u mean?

[mayoradamwe]

did u enable "adjust display refreshrate to match video" ?

Thanks bimme. I have been out of town and have not been able to give this a try, but, I'm nearly positive that in my initial troubleshooting I had this option set and it didn't change the results.

After I originally posted this topic, I installed OpenELEC on a flash drive and that works without issues (and without tweaking many settings). It definitely appears to be something within Windows. I'm wondering if maybe my hardware just doesn't have enough kick to run Windows and XBMC on top of it.

I should be home within a couple days and will give this setting a try but as I mentioned, I think I've tried this before with no effect (actually, the OpenELEC install works without this setting).

Thanks again,
Justin

[mayoradamwe]

FINALLY had a chance to sit down and test this and my previous statement is correct--Adjusting display refresh rate to match video has not improved the video any.

I even tried a few other settings around that area, as many combinations as I could think of and nothing seems to be fixing this issue. I'm tempted to just say screw Windows/XBMC and just stick with OpenELEC.

[ag3141]

This may not match your problem exactly, but I’ll past it anywayz.


I used to have these two problems.


1: Random audio/video stutter when watching a Blu-ray ISO, accompanied by a loud noise (bzzz-bzz-bzzz) that lasted 2-3 seconds and recurred frequently. How frequently, depends on the computers energy saving settings.

I solved it by turning of the timer that saves energy by stopping the hard drives from spinning. Apparently the stutter came from some type of electricity surge when the hard drives began to spin again. This probably happened after XBMC came to the end of the stored data in the RAM and needed to retrieve more data from the hard drive(?).

If you have Windows you should go to Start menu => Control panel => Hardware and Sound => Power Options => click on "Change plan settings" => click on "Change advanced power settings" => click on "Hard disk" => click on "Turn of hard disk after" => set it to "Never" => click "OK" at the bottom.


2: Buffering issues when watching a Blu-ray ISO from two of my hard drives, but not from my other hard drives. Eventually I realized that the buffering was due to the fact that these two hard drives where connected to a 4x PCI-E card http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/U3S6 that had two SATA 3 ports.

This card was supposed to speed things up, instead it did the opposite. I don't know why, but it was the cause of the buffering problem. I connected the hard drives to SATA 2.0 ports on the main motherboard and the buffering problem stopped.


This won't solve everyone's problems, but could be helpful in specific circumstances. I have reposted in different threads incase it could be useful to someone.


(W7, AMD Radeon HD 6450, Xonar Essence ST, Onkyo receiver, Sony projector, Eden and Transparency! 4.x)