[jytees]

Hi,

I'm running the latest Kodi build on a Windows 7 platform with the following spec:

i7 3770s 3.1 ghz cpu
8gb ddr 3
HD Graphics 4000, driver vers 10.18.10.4061

Video playback although not bad and certainly watchable, isn't exactly perfect. The odd stutter at busy scenes and pixelated dark background colours.

I had been advised that the cpu and HD 4000 Graphics would be more than enough to play 1080p seamlessly but that's not what I'm finding.

My question is have I missed something in the system setup or have I been badly advised?

I've made sure hardware acceleration is enabled with DXVA2 but not sure what other settings I could try.

Not sure what settings the Intel driver should be at either.

Any help and advice is very welcome!

[Bogi]

From my lurking around the forums it seems that you may get better picture quality by disabling hardware acceleration... your cpu definitely has the power to do the decoding so give it a shot. Also what's the file format and bitrate?

[jytees]

Thanks for your reply. I'll give it a shot.

I've downloaded various test videos mainly MP4 format but not sure what the bitrate is.

[afedchin]

Disable any video enhancements in Intel HD-Graphics Control Panel.

[jytees]

Disabling hardware acceleration seems to have improved the picture slightly. I wouldn't say it was perfect but there's certainly an improvement. Thanks for the advice Bogi.

Couldn't see any video enhancements in the Intel HD control panel to disable I'm afraid. Thanks anyway.

[Warner306]

Disabling hardware acceleration seems to have improved the picture slightly. I wouldn't say it was perfect but there's certainly an improvement. Thanks for the advice Bogi.

Couldn't see any video enhancements in the Intel HD control panel to disable I'm afraid. Thanks anyway.

It will never be perfect, especially if the content is compressed. But the frame-rate should not stutter at all. If it is stuttering something is wrong with the source or your video settings in Kodi.

If you want to push your graphics card to the limit in the name of better picture quality, I would try this combination. If you have a good remote like a Harmony, it is not that hard to live with. Otherwise, I would stick with Kodi and find better-quality sources such as ripped Blu-rays from a program such as MakeMKV.

I'm using scaling from a high-end renderer called madVR. Kodi remains my library front-end. Even using low-resource settings such as Bicubic100 + anti-ringing filter and Lanczos3 + anti-ringing filter on an HD3000, I can see the difference, but I am very picky about picture quality. I thought you might be in the same camp. You can only squeeze so much out of a crap video, but madVR is very good at what it does.