2015-03-18, 06:33
Hi everybody. I own two MBOX MXIII media players. One is the 1GB/8GB version and the other is the 2GB/8GB version. I had both for about six months and they've been working great. Recently I noticed that every video I play is zoomed in exactly 5% so I'm only actually seeing 95% of the video, and the rest is off the screen. This issue only happens when hardware acceleration is enabled and does not seem to happen if I switch to software decoding. I checked my screen calibration settings (both in Android and in Kodi itself) and everything is perfectly calibrated, so the issue isn't with my configuration.
If I go into the video settings and change the zoom amount from 100% to 95% then the video fills the screen perfectly. This works for every video and the zoom amount is always the same. However, I must manually change the zoom to 95% for every video I play, every time I play it. I tried the "Set as default for all videos" option, but that doesn't work properly. After setting that option, the next video I play will have a black border around it (exactly 5% of the screen) and inside that black "box" the video is cropped to 95% once again. Then if I go into the video settings and manually increase the zoom back to 100% and then back down to 95%, everything looks good again. Yeah, I know it sounds very strange, but it can be reproduced every time.
I was using Gotham 13.2 for a long time, because it was working well, until I noticed this issue with video playback. So I tried upgrading to the latest Kodi, but that has the same issue. In fact, this issue is present on all versions of Kodi all the way from Gotham 13.2 to the latest Kodi beta / RC / nightly release. But now I discovered a new issue while trying to fix the zoom problem. On every version of Kodi after Gotham 13.2 the screen goes black every time I seek in a video. On 13.2 the current frame would just freeze for a fraction of a second while it was was seeking and that's normal, but on every other version the screen turns completely black for a fraction of a second while seeking. Since I watch TV mostly in the dark and I frequently seek around in my videos, the black screen thing is extremely irritating and hard on the eyes.
Out of frustration, I went and upgraded my media player's firmware from 110k4 to 112k4, hoping it would fix the issue. Unfortunately that actually made things worse. Now even Gotham 13.2 has the black screen while seeking in videos, and the zoom issue is there on every version of the program too. I also tried every available version of SPMC and they all have the black screen thing and the zoom thing as well. But on SPMC if I manually lower the zoom to 95% and then use the "Set as default for all videos" option, it actually works properly and every video from then on displays at full size. The bigger issue is the black screen while seeking and I haven't found a solution for that. I'm completely out of ideas about what else I can try to fix these problems. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
PS. - These are the specs of my media player, in case it makes a difference.
Model: MXIII (MX3)
CPU: Amlogic S802 Quad Core up to 2.0GHz (Cortex-A9)
GPU: Octa core ARM Mali-450 GPU up to 600MHz
System: Android 4.4.2
Kernel Version: 3.10.33
Firmware: 112k4
If I go into the video settings and change the zoom amount from 100% to 95% then the video fills the screen perfectly. This works for every video and the zoom amount is always the same. However, I must manually change the zoom to 95% for every video I play, every time I play it. I tried the "Set as default for all videos" option, but that doesn't work properly. After setting that option, the next video I play will have a black border around it (exactly 5% of the screen) and inside that black "box" the video is cropped to 95% once again. Then if I go into the video settings and manually increase the zoom back to 100% and then back down to 95%, everything looks good again. Yeah, I know it sounds very strange, but it can be reproduced every time.
I was using Gotham 13.2 for a long time, because it was working well, until I noticed this issue with video playback. So I tried upgrading to the latest Kodi, but that has the same issue. In fact, this issue is present on all versions of Kodi all the way from Gotham 13.2 to the latest Kodi beta / RC / nightly release. But now I discovered a new issue while trying to fix the zoom problem. On every version of Kodi after Gotham 13.2 the screen goes black every time I seek in a video. On 13.2 the current frame would just freeze for a fraction of a second while it was was seeking and that's normal, but on every other version the screen turns completely black for a fraction of a second while seeking. Since I watch TV mostly in the dark and I frequently seek around in my videos, the black screen thing is extremely irritating and hard on the eyes.
Out of frustration, I went and upgraded my media player's firmware from 110k4 to 112k4, hoping it would fix the issue. Unfortunately that actually made things worse. Now even Gotham 13.2 has the black screen while seeking in videos, and the zoom issue is there on every version of the program too. I also tried every available version of SPMC and they all have the black screen thing and the zoom thing as well. But on SPMC if I manually lower the zoom to 95% and then use the "Set as default for all videos" option, it actually works properly and every video from then on displays at full size. The bigger issue is the black screen while seeking and I haven't found a solution for that. I'm completely out of ideas about what else I can try to fix these problems. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
PS. - These are the specs of my media player, in case it makes a difference.
Model: MXIII (MX3)
CPU: Amlogic S802 Quad Core up to 2.0GHz (Cortex-A9)
GPU: Octa core ARM Mali-450 GPU up to 600MHz
System: Android 4.4.2
Kernel Version: 3.10.33
Firmware: 112k4