[wubalub]

Howdy,

I'm having difficulty with some (not all) 1080p 8-bit HEVC files.

I've tried everything, including driver updates, installing the nightly, and debloating Windows for more performance/less background processes..

I'm getting sync issues, and it's using too much CPU. It's particularly bad with visually intense scenes.

After all my fiddling around, I'm certain it's Kodi problem not using my hardware decoder/acceleration fully. I came to this conclusion as the files play through just fine with the bog-standard POS that is Windows Media Player on Windows 10. Not only does the file play just fine, it isn't maxing out the poor Atom x5 at all.

Could there be a setting I'm missing? I updated from the latest stable to the nightly and it made no difference.

Any ideas?

Thank you

EDIT:
I've re-encoded the file to use less compression (450mb~ vs 180mb~) and that has solved the syncing and CPU usage issue. I'm still a bit concerned that the more compressed file could be played fine with Windows Media Player and not through Kodi though.

[PatK]

The HEVC issue will no doubt be the source of many future messages, decoding takes a lot of CPU effort and the majority of graphic cards will not handle these in hardware, and Kodi atm doesn't support gfx hardware decoding of HEVC. Not to mention the encoding irregularities in the files, and the onslaught of 4K UHD media sources just coming on stream. Kodi is development slightly behind the curve and a work in progress, (Kodi is available across a multitude of platforms and development is going to be slower than specific platform stand-alone players) the hope is that eventually all these new formats and encodes will be fully supported, just a bit of patience is needed, but did I need to say all this?

Thanks for the re-encode tip, you might want to share the software/settings for others that might help their re-encodes.

[wubalub]

The HEVC issue will no doubt be the source of many future messages, decoding takes a lot of CPU effort and the majority of graphic cards will not handle these in hardware, and Kodi atm doesn't support gfx hardware decoding of HEVC. Not to mention the encoding irregularities in the files, and the onslaught of 4K UHD media sources just coming on stream. Kodi is development slightly behind the curve and a work in progress, (Kodi is available across a multitude of platforms and development is going to be slower than specific platform stand-alone players) the hope is that eventually all these new formats and encodes will be fully supported, just a bit of patience is needed, but did I need to say all this?

Thanks for the re-encode tip, you might want to share the software/settings for others that might help their re-encodes.

That's fair, I didn't realise that Kodi was 100% not supporting hardware decode, the wiki makes some mention but isn't entirely clear.

As for my encoding settings, I just upped the allowable bitrate quite a bit, sort of defeating the purpose and could have just used h/x264 instead. I'd recommend just sticking with h/x264 at this point unless you're doing it for fun like I am.

[fritsch]

Kodi v17 supports HEVC-8bit and HEVC-10bit _in_ hardware on windows _if_ the driver supports it. HEVC-10 bit on intel hardware is a hybrid acceleration which only works reliable for <= 1080p.

On linux kodi v17 supports hevc-8 bit on this hardware.

[PatK]

Kodi v17 supports HEVC-8bit and HEVC-10bit _in_ hardware on windows _if_ the driver supports it. HEVC-10 bit on intel hardware is a hybrid acceleration which only works reliable for <= 1080p.

On linux kodi v17 supports hevc-8 bit on this hardware.

Good to know, hard to remember... perhaps someone will plant it in the wiki's.