[eddytv]

I recently upgraded from 17.0~git20160823.0914-beta1-0trusty to 17.0~git20161028.1906-beta5-0trusty and now video playback is jerky / stutters... unless there is any sort of on-screen display. It looks like frames are being dropped at regular intervals. But as soon as you do anything that requires an OSD, the video plays perfectly. Sounds is not affected, and plays fine even while video playback is messed up.

Unfortunately this makes it impossible to get a "useful" debug log, because when I go to Settings and enable debug logging, I get the debug on-screen display in the top-left corner and the video plays back just fine: the OSD shows a frame rate of ~60 FPS, and a CPU utilization of around 35% on CPU0 and CPU1, and around 60% for CPU-KODI.

I switched my PPA from unstable to nightly and installed 2:17.0~git20161120.0200-a37127e-0trusty, but sadly the problem still persists.

I can't find any builds of beta1-beta4 to help determine when this regression occurred.

I'm happy to provide the requisite debug logs to help diagnose this problem, but like I said, because of the debug OSD, I can't get a log during the time when this problem occurs. Any suggestions?

[eddytv]

Bump... still looking for suggestions on how to help track down what is causing this regression.

[Prof Yaffle]

Have a look at this:

http://kodi.wiki/view/advancedsettings.xml#loglevel

If you set loglevel = 1, you'll get a debug log without anything on screen, and without having to set it in the GUI. See what that shows.

[eddytv]

OK, here's my kodi.log file.

I appreciate anybody who has the time to take a look and offer up some theories why the video is "jerky" when there is not any OSD showing (it plays fine when there is). This frontend has been working great previously, up to and including with kodi17-beta1. So something changed between beta1 and beta5 to cause this regression (and it still isn't fixed in the latest nightlies).

Thanks in advance!

[eddytv]

Found the solution to this issue. Turns out it was not related to Kodi!

My first clue was glxinfo | grep -i direct reporting:

Code:

direct rendering: No (If you want to find out why, try setting LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose)

Running it with LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose didn't provide anything useful.

After trying to diagnose why Direct Rendering wasn't working, I finally found the answer at the Ubuntu forum: when I upgraded to Kodi 17 beta 5, I also got a new nVidia driver, and it has a bug that causes Direct Rendering to not be enabled.

Since I'm still running 14.04, I ran:

Code:

apt-get install nvidia-304=304.117-0ubuntu1
apt-mark hold nvidia-304

and now I have Direct Rendering again, and Kodi 17 beta 5 now plays videos just fine even when there is not any on-screen display.

(It is interesting to me that when Kodi put up any kind of OSD that the video played fine even without Direct Rendering support!)