Kodi Community Forum

I could have jumped into the "stuttering on linux" thread but I wanted to ask a specific question and not take that one off topic...

I'm currently setting up a prototype for a new HTPC which will, I hope, include XBMC. Not quite the final hardware but close enough to be testing...

Ubuntu 11.04, XBMC 10.1, Core2Duo E4500, GT520 GPU connecting by HDMI to a Panasonic plasma. Playing ISO rips of SD DVDs. Restricted Nvidia drivers loaded, used nvidia config tool to set up display.

And I'm getting stuttering - not major, but smooth pans aren't smooth. Just enough to be irritating! A Netgear streamer connecting to the same network server of course plays perfectly!

I played around with a lot of settings to get the best result I could, and firstly I was surprised that things seemed to be better if I turned off "Allow hardware acceleration (VDPAU)". What does that tell me?

Secondly, we played around with different settings and it seemed as if we were getting varying quality results when we changed "Render method". There were two of us watching a particular scene from Matrix Revisited over and over! And we couldn't quite put our finger on what was going on, but it did seem to make a difference.

Would someone be able to explain what the significance of the different options for "Render method" is? It might help me understand whether it's relevant to my situation!

TIA
Ceejay

Render method applies to YUV to RGB conversion, you can choose between ARB and glsl shaders, and software conversion.

Shaders are a lot faster than software conversion (assuming the gpu is fast enough, modern ones are), ARB and glsl shaders should look identical, unless you set scaling method during playback to anything else than bilinear or nearest neighbor.

bobo1on1 Wrote:Render method applies to YUV to RGB conversion, you can choose between ARB and glsl shaders, and software conversion.

Shaders are a lot faster than software conversion (assuming the gpu is fast enough, modern ones are), ARB and glsl shaders should look identical, unless you set scaling method during playback to anything else than bilinear or nearest neighbor.

And is not relevant for normal xbmc VDPAU mode (because pixmap method delivers already RGB), right? If interop_yuv mode was used as with FernetMenta's implementation then they would apply to VDPAU decode in this case.

Yes, it doesn't apply to vdpau at all.

bobo1on1 Wrote:Yes, it doesn't apply to vdpau at all.

But it can for interop_yuv vdpau method.

sorry to hijack this thread, but is RGB also default for vaapi?
is there a way to output YUV?

I have no idea but just to make sure it is clear...VDPAU YUV is not available in xbmc mainline either.