Kodi Community Forum

Alright.

Ive got a bit of an issue:

My hardware/software:

Win 8 x64
C2D E8400
AMD Radeon 6850 HD
Asus MB
Yamaha A1000 AVR
Samsung Plasma TV all via HDMI

The problem is that this happens at random, sometimes when I start XBMC it can't enable exclusive mode on WASAPI so I get stuttering video. A hard reset of my HTPC fixes this, and then it is OK again. The thing is it doesn't do this every time I restart XBMC and the driver versions have been constant throughout my testing and it has worked so I am not sure what is going on.

The only thing I can think off, I also run foobar /w WASAPI plugin in the background, but out to a USB DAC, and not via HDMI. Since they are separate playback devices there shouldn't be an issue with them each running in exclusive mode. And it has worked with this still running in the background.

Sometimes, but not every time, if I find I have stuttering video, I can go to audio settings enable DirectSound mode on AMD HDMI and renable WASAPI and it will fix it, but sometimes, I have to do a hard reset

It sounds like an HDMI handshake issue to me, not an exclusive mode issue. The exclusive mode is per device, so one won't interfere with another.

Yamaha's are well-known for dropping the handshake unfortunately. Normally the PC must be rebooted to re-establish it.

Ive never had an HDMI issue with anything else. I suppose I could try an HDMI Detective to see if that solves the issue. Since it is sporadic though, it could be something with the order of how things are turned on? I don't run XBMC as a persistent front-end, but rather start it as needed. The Yamaha AVR is set to passthrough video to the TV if its not on so it should never be interjecting its own EDID, but I wonder if it happens when I start XBMC before I turn the TV on? I have XBMC start shortcut mapped to a button on my remote, maybe in my power up routine its happened that way when this occuurs, thus without the TV on I wonder if it knows what the TV is capable of.

XBMC scans the active audio devices on startup. So yes, if the device isn't seen at startup (e.g. TV is off) it will not use that device.

(2012-12-28, 21:41)DDDamian Wrote: [ -> ]XBMC scans the active audio devices on startup. So yes, if the device isn't seen at startup (e.g. TV is off) it will not use that device.

IMO this definitely needs to change/improved.

@Martijn - yep. Some suggestions for how to proceed in internal forum. Gist of the issue is AE runs from the outset (for navsounds, response time etc) whereas Eden waited for a stream to be played. We may have to adopt that behaviour or simply suspend audio until the preferred device comes online. Trouble with that is it may never do so (e.g. HDMI receivers turned on after Windows boot are sometimes not seen, or in the case of Yamaha's often drop connections to GPUs).