Kodi Community Forum

Hello Community

i'am running XBMC PVR successfully for more than a year on an AT3IONT-Board.
(ION v1 - VDPAU Profile B)

Since the amount of HD-movies grows in my library, i suffered some "strange" stuttering. The overall playback performance is great, but sometimes fragments appear or frames are dropped (stuttering). Cause of the fact, that this problems occur in same (movie) sequence and only in some movies, i suspect that the movie codec profile cause the problems.

To prove this i watched the problematic movies on my Workstation (3.2Ghz dual core/8800GTS - VDPAU Profile A). The 8800GTS fails completely to play the movies without stuttering. If vodpau is disabled by xbmc, the movie runs smoothly and without any fragments.

So i switched to an AMD Fusion E-350 - Platform (E35M1-M Pro). XBMC runs well, smooth overall playback but again in some movies there are this codec related problems. A fallback to un-accelerated Playback isn't possible. The CPU seemed to weak for playback.

So my question is: what options are left. Run XBMC on a 3.2GHz workstation isn't really an option cause of the fan-noise and power consumption. But a 1.6Ghz dualcore seems to weak for 1080p/720p-playback. Are there any VA-API/VDPAU cards who has a wide spectrum of supported codec variants?

Or if i re-encode the movies, are there any detailed information's which h264-encoding-parameters are to use for perfect playback?

is the problematic video maybe h264 @Level5.1? AMDs drivers do not (yet) support L5.1.

can you post a mediainfo for the file?


If you reencode stick with High @L4.1

wsnipex Wrote:is the problematic video maybe h264 @Level5.1? AMDs drivers do not (yet) support L5.1.

can you post a mediainfo for the file?

I will check this, this evening.

What did you mean with "not supported"? Are there different levels of "Support". From "running perfect" to "some stuttet/fragments in some cases" until "totaly waste/stuttering all the time"

wsnipex Wrote:If you reencode stick with High @L4.1

I will check Handbreak for this option

Raptor 2101 Wrote:I will check this, this evening.
What did you mean with "not supported"? Are there different levels of "Support". From "running perfect" to "some stuttet/fragments in some cases" until "totaly waste/stuttering all the time"

Yes, it all depends on the encoding options. h264 L5.1 allows simply speaking higher bitrate and more reference frames then L4.1

At the moment, the ATI driver(fglrx) does not play well with L5.1, which results in artefacts, possible stuttering, garbled video et al.
This is supposed to change with later driver revisions, lets hope for the best.

Fortunately, most material found "on the web" is L4.1 though.

Is there any source for such information's? Like mailingslists, techspecs etc or is this all learned by pain?

Pain, pain and pain again. There is even no correct changelog in fglrx drivers. The h264 limit could be read out from xvba-va-driver. XVBA itself is documented in the xvba-sdk from amd.

Sorry for my late answer.

I spend my whole day, to reencode and test some different h264 profiles. I gotten warily as even the baseline-profile fails to play smoothly....

So i switched from DVI to old plain VGA-Wire. Fragments and stutter gone... One week of testing time wasted by a wire....

btw i switched back to the ION board, VDPAU seems more stable to me.

Thanks for yout help