[eddie_f]

On November 18th, Sky Germany changed all their remaining SD channels from DVB-S (MPEG-2) to DVB-S2 (MPEG-4). Since then I have trouble watching any of the affected SD channels (Sky Comedy for example) on my Raspberry Pi 2 with Kodi 15.2 (Openelec 6). The picture shows big blocks like there is not enough bandwith or bad reception, although everything is fine on the receiving side. I can record the program and watch the resulting file with vlc on my windows box just fine.

I was messing around with the video settings for a while now and as a last resort I disabled the video acceleration completely and presto, that did the trick with those damned MPEG-4 SD channels. No more distortion visible.
But since the RPI2 is very weak without video acceleration, disabling that is not going to work as i mainly watch HD channels with only a few SD channels left.

There is something broken in the video acceleration for MPEG-4 SD content.
Does anyone know a trick to fix that or should I open a bug report? My previous searches neither found anything related nor any solutions.

BTW: the windows version of Kodi shows the same behaviour. Disabling DXVA2 solves the problem there, but since the RPI2 runs on linux there is no DXVA2 to blame.

[noggin]

There are a number of H264 SD channels on the UK Freeview platform that the Pi 2 plays fine (DVB-T2 receivers are H264 compatible, so any SD content on a DVB-T2 mux is encoded in H264 rather than MPEG 2). Wonder if it is just the particular H264 encoding profile that Sky Deutschland has chosen to use that is causing problems?

Might be worth recording some off-air and messaging links to Popcornmix, who is amazingly helpful at diagnosing and fixing these kind of issues?

[eddie_f]

Will do some test recordings and check in with Popcornmix. Thanks so far.

-EDIT: I tried to write a PM, but I cannot access that feature right now. Is there something I have to do to get access to the messaging page?

[Milhouse]

You don't have enough posts to start sending PMs. Just post it here, @popcornmix will see it.

A reproducible sample file (50MB-100MB) is the best way to a long term solution.

[eddie_f]

@popcornmix:

If you find some time, please have a look at this recording: MPEG-4 SD from Sky
Password is: kodirpi

If you play the video on a Pi2 with Kodi 15.2 or on Windows with Kodi 15.2 the video looks like this: Screenshot MPEG-4 SD from Sky

If I disable the video acceleration it plays fine on the Pi and on Windows it's enough to disable DXVA2. Windows is good that way, but the Pi doesn't have the processing power to play HD content without video acceleration, so there must be some kind of bug in the video acceleration.

Please contact me if you need more information.

Thanks in advance,

Eddie

[noggin]

If it is of any help, MediaInfo reports the following about the video contents of that file :

Code:

Video
ID                                       : 511 (0x1FF)
Menu ID                                  : 20 (0x14)
Format                                   : AVC
Format/Info                              : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile                           : High@L3
Format settings, CABAC                   : Yes
Format settings, ReFrames                : 4 frames
Codec ID                                 : 27
Duration                                 : 5mn 7s
Bit rate                                 : 2 785 Kbps
Width                                    : 720 pixels
Height                                   : 576 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 16:9
Frame rate                               : 25.000 fps
Standard                                 : PAL
Color space                              : YUV
Chroma subsampling                       : 4:2:0
Bit depth                                : 8 bits
Scan type                                : Interlaced
Scan order                               : Top Field First
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)                       : 0.269
Stream size                              : 102 MiB (74%)
Color range                              : Limited
Color primaries                          : BT.601 PAL
Transfer characteristics                 : BT.470 System B, BT.470 System G
Matrix coefficients                      : BT.601

[popcornmix]

This is known about. See this issue. Hopefully will be resolved soon.

[eddie_f]

Thanks a lot for your quick reply. I didn't know how to find that answer myself