Kodi Community Forum

I'm currently experiencing significant playback issues when playing 1080p movies. I am playing movies over my gigabit ethernet network. I don't seem to have issues when playing SD videos or 720p movies. When playing 1080p movies, I encounter numerous dropped frames (1000s of dropped frames). According to the on-screen diagnostics, my frame rate is 23.976, P(VQ) stays above 90% and my P(MB/S) is between 11-15. Some of the cores of my CPU, however, show high utilization (i.e. > 70%). My hardware is the following:

AMD Phenom II X4 B93 Socket AM3 Processor (2.8GHz)
ASUS M5A78L-M LX+ motherboard
3 GB RAM
VisionTek 900311 Radeon HD 5450 (Cedar) 512MB 64-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card

I would greatly appreciate it if someone could point me in the right direction for how to diagnose the root cause of these issues. Is it my video card not supporting enough codecs? Should I buy a Crystal HD decoder? Do I not have enough CPU?

hit "o" during playback and check for codec info. if it says ffmpeg-h264 you are software decoding. Although I would expect your CPU to be capable to do that, you might want to use your GFX card for that.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=116996

to make sure its not the network, copy one of those files to the local hdd and try again.

Below is the information displayed when I type "o" during playback. Some of the items I understand, yet many I do not.

D(Audio: AC3, 48000 HZ, 5.1(SIDE), S16, 448 KB/S) P(AQ: 99%, KB/S: 435.11, ATT:0.0 DB)
D(Video: H264 (High), YUV420P, 1920x816) P(FR:25.000, VQ:93%, DC:FF-H264, MB/S 6.48, DROP: 83, PC:1)
C(AD:0.000, AV: 0.020, EDL: -, DCPU: 2% ACPU: 5% VCPU: 94% CACHE:0 B 100%)
W(FPS: 23.74 CPUO: 3.6%, CPU1: 11.1%, CPU2: 20%, CPU3:48%)

Which item is the codec? Is it the DC variable? It looks as though I am hardware decoding if I am interpreting the VCPU variable properly. That is also inline with the VAAPI setting I have turned on.

DC:FF-H264 -> Software decoding, which explains your issue.

see the link above

So I'm currently running the OpenElec version of XBMC which means I'm not using a typical Linux version. On the plus side, I just upgraded my OS and it seems to support XVGA. When I look at the codec, I now see FF-H264-XVBA and no longer see dropped frames!

Thanks for your help wsnipex. Would you be able to tell me what the other items mean when pressing "o" during playback? Thanks again!

@grooter:
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Video_playback <- See last chapter