Please help! Frame drops @50 Hz on ION/VDPAU
#16
There are some some software upscaling methods that have better results for some people rather than solely relying on the native video hardware, these tend to be processor intensive though and the atom isn't up to it.

There used to be an option as detailed here
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=My_Videos_Settings but I'm not sure if the wiki is out of date or it is just my funky pvr build but I don't have those options, so as I said before each time I view 1080i Sat HD content I have to make sure to switch to bilinear.
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#17
I checked, and it turns out that some time ago I actually set "bilinear" as the standard scaling method for everything I'm watching. So.... I have that setting already, but still the stuttering/slomo/ff effects.
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#18
Am suddenly getting this issue when I didn't have it before, on a particular TV series I have encoded at 1080i@50Hz; also on atom/ion hardware. This particular series left interlaced because encoding to progressive made the many left-to-right slow pans across gorgeous landscapes the director was fond of stutter horribly.

Up until recently these played very well on this system, but some recent change has stopped that, and playback is now accompanied by an unsteadily-rising count of dropped frames, which is visible on screen and pretty distracting.

Meanwhile... I have some 1080i@60Hz material (25-30fps telecined) that I've left in that form because they defeated all attempts to detelecine/deinterlace to anything pleasing, but which XBMC didn't used to play back well - now play back beautifully with no dropped frames at all besides a few as it sorts itself out at start of playback.

The fact the 60Hz material plays perfectly makes me think this isn't a matter of pure performance, as presumably those would need more. Also, the CPUs (hyperthreading makes the one cpu look like two to the OS) aren't being taxed very much in either case.

It is definitely switching to 50Hz - and also does so to play back 25fps progressive material perfectly.

Oh now that's fascinating... I said it's "switching to 50Hz" but that wasn't strictly accurate as that's currently the default refresh rate the xbmc user interface runs in. So I manually switched that to 60Hz, then went to play the 1080i@50Hz material, and it did its heavy switch thing, and played perfectly.

Then I went to play the 1080i@60Hz material, for which it now *didn't* have to switch, and it showed the (different) judder problem I always had before for that.

There's something magical about having to actually switch refresh rates?

I think my temporary answer then may be to add a screen mode to my xorg.config that satisfies none of my content's requirements, use that for the xbmc UI, so it always has to switch to the appropriate mode before playback.

(It's nuts, I guess; but maybe the process of doing the refresh-rate switch is just resetting something or aligning something happily?)

Sadly, it being a television, its EDID doesn't actually have any refresh rates I don't have content for, like a 75Hz mode... Will have to think about that.

The below was written before the above section; may continue to serve to document an approach taken that made no difference:

The only recent big change to my setup I can think of is upgrading it from ubuntu natty to oneiric; but I can't remember if I've played this TV show since then (when I would have noticed this problem, it's unmissable) or before.

Just tried installing newer nvidia driver from ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates - as I had been using that before the upgrade to oneiric, but generally start a new distro version vanilla before finding reasons to upgrade... but applying the update to nvidia-drivers 285.05.09 made no difference. :-(
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#19
Set UI/default mode to 24Hz. This problem only seems to affect interlaced content, no 24fps movies are interlaced; they continue to play fine without needing a refresh-rate switch. Sorted, at the cost of some visible flicker and loss of smoothness on UI animations. :-)
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#20
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current
sudo reboot
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Please help! Frame drops @50 Hz on ION/VDPAU0