[hansheijmans]

Hi,

I try to play .dv video (raw dv-image) shot with Sony DV camera (SD quality), grabbed with dvgrab on Linux (syntax: dvgrab -autosplit -format raw -timestamp). Video playback is completely out of sync and sound is garbled. After a while the image even freezes with strange noise or even hangs Kodi. I have this problem both on OpenElec and OSMC, (Kodi 15.2). CPU usage on my RPi2 rises up to 70% when playing.

Didn't have this problem with Kodi 14.

As a workaround I play the videos with Universal Media Server (fork of PS3 Media Server) with Kodi as DLNA client but I don't consider this an ideal solution...

No problems whatsoever with 1080p mkv or even 1:1 bluray rips with CPU usage topping at 12-13% at the most.

I play all video from NFS share thru wired ethernet.

Thanks!

[popcornmix]

No hardware acceleration for DV video, and so software decode is not keeping up.
You'll need to reencode to a common format (e.g. h.264) to play it on a Pi
or use a more powerful platform than can software decode it.

[hansheijmans]

Hi popcornmix,

Thanks for the info!

I did try to re-encode to h.264 and it did work. The reason I keep the DV files is to preserve the original video and audio quality as these videos contain a lot of family history. What do you suggest I should use (using Linux)? Handbrake of batch re-encode with ffmpeg for instance, preserving as much of the original quality as possible?

Thanks again!

[noggin]

I'd probably transcode DV25 stuff to interlaced MPEG2 or H264 - but if you shot on a regular camcorder in 50i or 60i interlaced (aka i25/i30) then Handbrake may not be the best bet as it may deinterlace. I'd probably do it using an ffmpeg or ffmbc command line.

[hansheijmans]

Just finished re-encoding all my DV and raw AVI files (approximately 350 GB in total) to MP4 using winff (ffmpeg GUI, using option MPEG-4 H.264 video in Super High Quality) and the results are fine. Also total file size reduced with one-third to half! All videos play fine without stuttering and CPU load around 30% for one CPU and few percent on the others (used to be around 70-80% on all CPUs when playing DV). Seems I am using hardware acceleration now!

Thank you all for your comments!