Hi,
I've been dealing with horizontal screen flickering/tearing pretty much since Gotham and OS X Mavericks. Tried every possible solution without success except turning off VDA hw acceleration - using MBA late 2010 with that unfortunate GF 320M card. Now running Yosemite 10.10.1&latest Kodi nightly (also tried RC2) and it seems that with ffmpegvda enabled in advanced settings I got rid of the video issues finally but there's one strange problem - every movie I tested starts without vda (dc:ff-h264) and uses around 50 - 60% of the cpu but if I only use fast forward/rewind/jumpback/etc it enables vda and there's a dc:ff-h264-vda and also cpu usage drops to around 20%. If I rewind the second time it turns vda off again and so it goes with every rewind/fast forward..
Here's the link to the log file in which included is starting a video (no vda) and then using fast forward after a couple of seconds so vda got enabled.
http://pastebin.com/sif2MbTD
Any idea?
Thanks,
wishy
As you have no doubt discovered Horizontal screen flickering / tearing is symptomatic of display device Vertical synchronisation issues.
Vertical sync is usually turned Off for Video gaming as it introduces Input lag whilst the screen is rendered and then perfectly Synced, regardless of any tearing issues that are introduced.
But for streaming video we want perfection:
XBMC > System > Settings > System > Video output > Vertical blank sync > Select Always enabled - if having issues described above.
That will fix the video tearing issues, I'm unable to help with the errors in the log tho.
log is useless - you cat it and didn't tell what exactly you did to produce the log
I do have vsync set to always enabled but that does not help unfortunately, the problem seems more complex with all those older macs and geforce 320m + Mavericks&up, and affects much more users. I actually went through quite a few threads related to video tearing and checked various settings that were suggested to be related to the problem, including even audio output, changing number of channels, disabling passthrough or testing with built-in output, then adjusting display refresh rate to match the video which subjectively helps a bit but causes audio to be out of sync sooner or later (especially after pasuing or rewinding), at least in Kodi and if VDA is enabled (and yes, I tried all of the a/v sync methods).
As it started in Mavericks and Gotham it didn't stop with Helix, only as I personally noticed seems to be more random, previously I could rewind and in particular scenes it would always happen, now with Helix not necessarily.
The only thing so far that definitely helps is turning off hw acceleration which would be fine with me if I didn't need that extra cpu power or if I liked fan noise
That's why enabling ffmpegvda is so great - solves the problem too and uses vda. Just that I have to remember to odd rewind/fastforward, if even there won't be vda
Best,
wishy
(2014-12-06, 12:17)Memphiz Wrote: [ -> ]log is useless - you cat it and didn't tell what exactly you did to produce the log
Hi Memphiz,
I enabled ffmpegvda via advancedsettings.xml, then I run Kodi, enabled debug log with verbose ffmpeg and started a video. It started with dc:ff-h264 and high cpu usage, then I jumped forward 30 seconds and vda got enabled by itself, as the info said dc:ff-h264-vda and cpu usage around 20%. Well, that's the log. Is there anything else I could provide?
Using late 2010 MBA, Yosemite 10.10.1 and Kodi 14.0-RC2 Git:2014-12-05-ecd5425-dirty, same happened with previous nightlies and rc2.
Thanks.
Hi there,
Well, I slowly get the feeling as well that a lot of issues occur on systems running the gforce 320m. I have quite a few similar issues on my MacBook Pro with a 320m too. Including the sound immediately going out of sync when I enable "Adjust display refresh rate to video", slight tearing sometimes and random audio sync issues.
I have also read quite a few threads and the 320m seems to be the one common denominator in systems that have various sound and video issues. My MacBook pro, some Mac Mini and your Macbook Air.
Regards, F
Talk about frustrating as !
I was going to suggest downloading the trial version of SwitchResX and creating some custom refresh rates but I doubt even that would help.
Definitely seems like the NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics processor in certain Mac Models just does not want to play nice with XBMC / Kodi.
I would buy and overlock a cheap RPi, or splash out when a Chromebox comes on sale again and end the pain.
At least then you will have a proven reliable platform.
Yup, true that. But there is hope for us (or at least me.. hehe) as ffmpegvda in Helix solved all of my issues, video tearing gone, audio out of sync gone, cpu usage normal, so it's perfect as it used to be in Mountain Lion and before with XBMC versions earlier than Gotham. FlowT - you may want to check enabling ffmpegvda too. Just need to solve that mysterious rewind once/jumpforward or back once to actually enable the vda with ffmpeg.
Cheers,
wishy
"Houston, we have main engine start"
Now to get Navigation online !!
@
wishy22
Sounds interesting. I'll give that a try. Does that mean I should disable normal hardware acceleration in the gui preferences after I enable ffmpegvda in advanced config?
@
wrxtasy
Yeah, I was thinking about maybe investing into a pi or a chromebox as well. Most likely a chromebox, since it has slightly more performance overhead. Then either install openelec on it or some Linux distro with Kodi on top.
As far as I read you should keep hw acceleration enabled, so did I. I wonder if you'd have to rewind/fast forward to actually enable ffmpegvda too (you probably know that but pressing 'o' during video playback will tell whether it's enabled..)
Ok, thanks.
I'll give all that a try later.
Ok, so I have played around with this a bit. The interesting thing is that when I have ffmpegvda enabled in the advanced preferences I do have to make a 30 second skip during playback so that it does get enabled. However on a subsequent 30 second skip it gets disabled again. On the next skip enabled again and so forth. Seems skipping toggles it somehow.
Whats also interesting is that with ffmpegvda enabled, it seems I can finally enable "Adjust display refresh rate to video" without the audio going completely out of sync immediately. Something that used to cause problems before.
However enabling "Sync playback to display" on top of that makes things go completely bonkers again. It seems to me that what happens then is that the TV gets switched to 24Hz but Kodi tries to adjust the playback to 60Hz. At least the last line of the info panel says: S (refresh: 60.000 ...
That was just a quick test now and I still need to investigate all that a bit further for long term effects. Which would be easier of course if ffmpegvda wouldn't toggle on every skip.
So you have exactly the same issues with ffmpegvda, one skip to enable, second skip to disable and so on.. Thanks for checking that FlowT. I must say I never tried sync playback to display with ffmpegvda, I just used adjust display refresh rate which worked fine and audio did stay in sync so there was no need to use sync playback.. but most important for me was that I finally got rid of video tearing with this. Hopefully toggle on and off by skipping can be fixed
wishy you have cut that log (typo in my response before) - can you post the full log? Also there is a reason we put ffmpegvda into advancedsettings - there are movies which get wrong colors with this decoder.