2016-02-18, 20:01
Has anyone else noticed that they get occasional stuttering when playing music with paplayer, but not with dvdplayer (15.2 Isengard)? I've got an excellent WiFi signal and Amazon's own content and music never stutters. Obviously, dvdplayer doesn't do gapless playback so it's not as desirable to use, but I seem to get about 2-6 stutters an hour on average with the song just cutting out for a fraction of a second with paplayer. I've even watched the System Info CPU meters but I haven't noticed a correlation (might happen too quick to see that way, though). Given Fire TV Stick's own GUI is still sitting in the background, it could be interference with it doing some background task, but paplayer seems far more susceptible to whatever it is here than dvdplayer (which with testing so far has yet to stutter on me). My outboard DAC/Surround decoder in one of my rooms doesn't instantly lock-on to a signal (keeping audio device alive solves it for the most part, but it doesn't seem to work with dvdplayer so I'm hit with a sound whammy either way and no gapless playback to boot with dvdplayer). Using an external visualizer (ProjectM Android App) or playing back a song that is 24/96 and has to be resampled to 48kHz increases the frequency of the stuttering (often near where the next song starts in that case; far more random on regular AAC/MP3 files) so a CPU connection does seem likely (or even lack of RAM in the case of the ProjectM visualizer as Kodi will often just quit randomly after awhile when it's running).
Looking at other threads (here and elsewhere), I have noticed a pattern in that stutters often occur with paplayer, but not dvdplayer and I'm wondering what the internal difference might be that makes dvdplayer so much more immune. Given the gapless issue (and the outboard decoder in one room), it's not really a good "fix" and I've had to resort to keeping an older Apple TV around just to playback music if I don't want to have random interruptions (worse than a record player skipping). I've seen no mention of this issue in Jarvis betas so I'm going to assume it's likely to continue in the future. Video caching can be tinkered with, but I'm not aware of any method to cache music only files to see if that makes any difference.
My Gen1 AppleTV running OpenElec and 15.2 Isengard rarely if ever stutters by comparison with music files. I was going to assume given its age that it's a slower CPU, but given that without hardware acceleration turned on, it can still do lower bitrate 720P HD and FireTV Stick cannot, perhaps the Fire TV Stick is still slower (other operations start much faster on the Fire TV Stick though and it clearly has dual cores). Of course, running OpenElec, it doesn't have Amazon's GUI doing things in the background either.
Looking at other threads (here and elsewhere), I have noticed a pattern in that stutters often occur with paplayer, but not dvdplayer and I'm wondering what the internal difference might be that makes dvdplayer so much more immune. Given the gapless issue (and the outboard decoder in one room), it's not really a good "fix" and I've had to resort to keeping an older Apple TV around just to playback music if I don't want to have random interruptions (worse than a record player skipping). I've seen no mention of this issue in Jarvis betas so I'm going to assume it's likely to continue in the future. Video caching can be tinkered with, but I'm not aware of any method to cache music only files to see if that makes any difference.
My Gen1 AppleTV running OpenElec and 15.2 Isengard rarely if ever stutters by comparison with music files. I was going to assume given its age that it's a slower CPU, but given that without hardware acceleration turned on, it can still do lower bitrate 720P HD and FireTV Stick cannot, perhaps the Fire TV Stick is still slower (other operations start much faster on the Fire TV Stick though and it clearly has dual cores). Of course, running OpenElec, it doesn't have Amazon's GUI doing things in the background either.