Kodi Community Forum

Hi guys,

Tried searching for this but either my search-fu is non-existant or this is a new issue.

I'm getting some random stutter when I'm watching movies, TV shows and listening to music, doesn't matter if it's a crappy mp3 or a 1080p movie. The stutter is completely random and only for a couple of seconds, then everything is normal until the stutter comes back, again randomly. I'm GUESSING it's an audio issue but I'm not sure and I'm a newbie at these things.

HARDWARE:

CPU: Intel® Core™ i3 3217-U 1,8 Ghz Dual-core
RAM Amount: 8 GB
Video card: Intel HD Graphics 4000, Driver version: 9.17.10.2932 (The driver version 9.17.10.3071 gives me distorted graphics)
Sound card: Audio: Intel HD Audio, Driver version: 6.14.0.3097
TV: Sony Bravia 40", connected to my NUC with a HDMI cable which also plays audio through the TV spekers

SOFTWARE:

Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit
XBMC Frodo 12.2

DEBUG LOG:
http://pastebin.com/1x7EhnBT (The stutter on this occassion occured during the song Medication which starts at 13:41:16)

SCREENSHOTS:

XBMC Audio Output: http://s3.postimg.org/q1mqgjupf/screenshot000.png
Supported formats: http://s24.postimg.org/qz0s2m3f9/formats.png
Advanced: http://s10.postimg.org/n4dkb14k9/advanced.png

Again, it's hard to reproduce since it's completely random and happens to every media type (mp3, mkv, avi...). Sometimes it takes five minutes and sometimes five hours. Thankful for any and all help!

are you set to use true fullscreen instead of a fullscreen window? windowed mode makes things jittery sometimes.

Yeah, true fullscreen is enabled.

Have you tried Directsound instead of WASAPI? Also if your stuff is on a seperate device (Server,NAS) is there anything else running on the network when the stutter happens?

I'm running a test with Directsound right now, haven't tried that before.

I only have Microsoft Security Essentials running in the backgrund and all my stuff is on two external harddrives which are plugged into the NUC via USB ports (which haven't given me any problems before). Besides that, nothing is running on the computer or the network besides Microsoft's standard services.

No luck with Directsound either :-(

Whenever it stutters, pausing/unpausing fixes the issue until next time. I really can't understand what the issue is, and it doesn't seem like the log is saying much either...

So I ran some tests last night with MPC-HC instead of XBMC and I didn't encounter any stutter, which leads me to believe that it is indeed an issue with XBMC rather than hardware.

Here are a screenshot of my video settings if it helps anyone: http://s11.postimg.org/wak1xdxsz/screenshot001.png

Audio settings are in the first post.

Did you try to turn off DXVA2

That seems to have done the trick. Thanks! If I knew how to give reputation I would :-)

I’ve had the same problem for over a year now. I’ve also had the DXVA2 turned on. It’s of now, I hope it will fix the problem. But, I’ve had the problem also when XBMC was turned off, so it must be something else. I’m also thinking the problem is somehow connected to the sound driver.

This may not match your problem exactly, but I’ll past it anywayz.


I used to have these two problems.


1: Random audio/video stutter when watching a Blu-ray ISO, accompanied by a loud noise (bzzz-bzz-bzzz) that lasted 2-3 seconds and recurred frequently. How frequently, depends on the computers energy saving settings.

I solved it by turning of the timer that saves energy by stopping the hard drives from spinning. Apparently the stutter came from some type of electricity surge when the hard drives began to spin again. This probably happened after XBMC came to the end of the stored data in the RAM and needed to retrieve more data from the hard drive(?).

If you have Windows you should go to Start menu => Control panel => Hardware and Sound => Power Options => click on "Change plan settings" => click on "Change advanced power settings" => click on "Hard disk" => click on "Turn of hard disk after" => set it to "Never" => click "OK" at the bottom.


2: Buffering issues when watching a Blu-ray ISO from two of my hard drives, but not from my other hard drives. Eventually I realized that the buffering was due to the fact that these two hard drives where connected to a 4x PCI-E card http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/U3S6 that had two SATA 3 ports.

This card was supposed to speed things up, instead it did the opposite. I don't know why, but it was the cause of the buffering problem. I connected the hard drives to SATA 2.0 ports on the main motherboard and the buffering problem stopped.


This won't solve everyone's problems, but could be helpful in specific circumstances. I have reposted in different threads incase it could be useful to someone.


(W7, AMD Radeon HD 6450, Xonar Essence ST, Onkyo receiver, Sony projector, Eden and Transparency! 4.x)