Kodi Community Forum

Hello All - 

I have recently bought a Sony Bravia 4K TV, this is a replacement to my previous (and now faulty) 1080p LG TV.

I am running Kodi v18.6 on top of an Intel NUC 8i3BEH, a reasonably good machine (a 2019 model) with Intel Iris Pro graphics (this is even more powerful than the new 10th gen Intel NUCs). I have Ubuntu 18.04 with a 5.3 Kernel. I have also updated the BIOS (to latest Intel version as per their website) and latest HDMI firmware (had to install Windows to install it, then put my Ubuntu image back on). 

The problem I have is this:
If I run Ubuntu at its native resolution for the TV, so at 3840x2160p (4K), and run Kodi at that resolution, any videos that I have that are 1080p (which to be fair is most things) has fairly bad motion stutter. Any camera pans are jerky, and it feels like Kodi is struggling to "upscale" the footage smoothly. 

I wonder if there are any settings that I should use within Kodi that would fix this? 

Ideally there would be settings which people could recommend I try. I say this because firstly I'm sure I will watch some 4K videos through Kodi at some point and I would like to be able to enjoy them at their native resolution. I would like to leave Kodi on its "default" settings and have confidence that any 1080p video that I put through it will look good. 

I tried a work around of setting Kodi to use the 1920x1080p setting. When I do this, the video naturally plays fine. However, if I put my TV to sleep, when I wake it up again it defaults back to the 3840x2160 resolution, thus making Kodi appear to take up 1/4 of the screen. I then struggle to get the software to perform because if I go back to the settings where I chose the resolution (Settings > System > Display > Resolution), it is still on 1920x1080 and so I have to try exiting the software and restarting it, and it's all just a hassle if I want to use the machine without a mouse and leave it as a media center (controlling it only with the Kodi remote on my iPhone). 

I may try a hardware solution of using an EDID handshake emulator between the HDMI cable from the Intel NUC and the Sony Bravia TV, to force the NUC and the TV to see a 1920x1080p hardware limitation in each other. This may well work. But then, it will be a hassle when I want to come to watch videos that are 4K. 

So I wonder if anybody could kindly recommend any settings that will help Kodi to playback (like I said, possibly "upscale") the 1080p videos smoothly? A nice software setting that I haven't seen or considered would be ideal....

(Just for clarity's sake, I can set both the Ubuntu to a display setting of 1920x1080 resolution, and the Kodi to 1920x1080, and send my TV to sleep, and when I wake the TV up, all I see is the Kodi a quarter of the size of the screen as I previously said.)

Thanks very much to everybody who has taken the time to read this - I wish you to stay healthy through this Coronavirus situation. 

Best regards.

Try the following:

Set the Kodi GUI to 4k

Enable 1920*1080/24 and 1920*1080/23.97 at the whitelist (settings -> system -> display)

And see if that fixes something. Your FullHD movies won't be upscaled to 4k anymore and the stuttering should be gone.

(2020-03-31, 06:34)DaVu Wrote: [ -> ]Try the following:

Set the Kodi GUI to 4k

Enable 1920*1080/24 and 1920*1080/23.97 at the whitelist (settings -> system -> display)

And see if that fixes something. Your FullHD movies won't be upscaled to 4k anymore and the stuttering should be gone.

Hello DaVu

thanks so much for your very quick reply! 

To my delight I think this has solved it! 

Actually I enabled all the raster sizes and frame rates in the Whitelist (I hadn't realised some of my media was at 720p, and as I'm in the UK I needed to enable the 25/50Hz ones). 

Why are Whitelists needed I wonder? Surely Kodi should make any raster size playable up to the actual size of the TV? 

Interestingly, I found things also improved when I turned off "Delay after change of Refresh Rate", which was by default set to 20seconds. I turned it off completely. I think this was possibly also causing what seemed like GUI hangs. I wonder why there is that option. Maybe for old TVs? 

Anyway I'm presently very happy, thank you once again. 

(PS I have some other Kodi queries but to help everybody see visibility I'll log them as separate threads). 

Wish you a great day.

Switching down the resolution is a workaround for your GPU being too slow to upscale from 1080p to 3840. When downswitching to 1080p, nothing needs to be scaled anymore and your TV scales - might be good quality or bad one. Alternatively, you could keep it in 4K resolution, but change the scaling algorithm from Auto to Bilinear.

This may be the answer as to why my mythtv playback did this. It simply couldn't keep up with the 1080p channels. I will test this tonight and see how it works out.

(2020-03-31, 06:34)DaVu Wrote: [ -> ]Try the following:

Set the Kodi GUI to 4k

Enable 1920*1080/24 and 1920*1080/23.97 at the whitelist (settings -> system -> display)

And see if that fixes something. Your FullHD movies won't be upscaled to 4k anymore and the stuttering should be gone.

Further update for @DaVu : 

I have noticed that the playback of smaller resolutions than 4k seem to cause an issue when switching to and from them. Often times, particularly after playing a video and having stopped it, the video will be stuck in the top left hand corner of the screen (its size relative to the 4k total raster, so it would be small) and the rest of the screen will remain black for quite a few seconds (enough to make you think the program might have crashed on occasion). This happens on 1080p videos (where the image will be a quarter of the screen and the rest black) and with 720p videos (where the image will be nearly a sixth of the screen and the rest black)

However, despite whitelisting all the various raster sizes in the Whitelist section, it refused to play some MP4 videos that have been produced at an unusual raster size. The example I have is, I was watching an archive documentary that someone had ripped to 592x432, which is obviously not in the standardised list of Whitelists. 

All of the above was when I was keeping Kodi on the default Resolution of my TV, of 3840x2160p. 

I then set Kodi to the HD Resolution, 1920x1080p. It played the archive documentary fine, no problem. 

So it seems like it has a rendering issue when set to 4K (3840x2160) and its coming out of much smaller raster sizes (720p and below). 

Any thoughts? Your help most appreciated in advance.

Hi, I just thought i will ask here rather than creating another similar topic.


Does anyone know what nVidia GPU is enough for 1080p VDPAU playback with deinterlacing when Kodi GUI is set to 3840x2160 (4K) ?

GT730 cannot keep up with deinterlacing at 4K GUI, tooo many skipped frames.


Is GT1030 enough for full Temporal/Spatial deinterlacing at 2160p 50 Hz (Lanczos3 upscaling) or do you need faster GPU for that?

Alternatively, how does Intel HW decoding compares in that matter (what CPU is needed) ?

Thanks for info.

I don't think anyone knows. Developer team changed away from Nvidia years ago.

Most likely it's not the deinterlacing that causes the issue but the lanczos3 upscaler which is while generic too slow in general.

Can you switch scaling to bilinear? Just for testing?

when setting NN or bilinear scaling is almost ok, unless i open anything in GUI.
when setting video picture to original size = video rendered in 1080p frame in middle, its ok.

looks like gt730 cant handle deinterlacing at 4k + scaling, so I am interested if gt1030 would be enough or I need something faster.
only could find that
GT730 have 384/16/8 vs GT1030 384/24/16 (Main Shader Processors / Texture Mapping Units / Render Output Units )
and qvdpautest 1080p h264 decoding
126 fps GT730 vs 215 fps  GT1030
unfortunately couldnt find full qvdpautest so I cannot compare Temporal / Spatial performance.

Nvidia is not a real option for Linux any more. There is no 10bit video with Nvidia+VDPAU in Linux. Support is possibly halted for Nvidia after Kodi 19.

I know, I dont mind using older Kodi version and have no use for 10bit HEVC atm.
I watch live TV (= 1080p 50hz with double fps deinterlacer (Temporal/Spatial in case of nvidia) + lancozs3 scaling) . and Im wondering if someone can help what can do this job at 4k Kodi GUI. (no frame skipping even when browsing menus)
Even if someone have an experience with Intel GPU which can achieve that I would love to hear it, but nvidia usage with GT1030+ would be preferred, in that case i can only swap GPU.

20 days later and I finally found a way to lock the 4k out of my Kodi machines. They are all hardlocked at 1080p output. Near as I can tell they don't even see 4k as an option. Done with Xrandr. In my case it was a single config file on my LTSP server and reboot them. Solved the issue altogether for me. However if you have actual 4k content then this is not a solution. Just need  more oomph on the hardware side I guess.

4k is not the problem for media files, just for outputting smaller material that needs upscaling.

Indeed. In my case my media files played fine, nothing bigger than 720p I believe. DVD rips and stuff downloaded from my religious organizations website. But my Mythtv playback was the big issue. I guess it was trying to upscale 1080p channels. That is where my problem was, Mythtv playback of those channels. I can say that locking resolution did solve the issue in that case.

My apologies. Should have specified.

I tested GT730 with with kodi 18.7 (Bionic) and to my surprise I was able to get Temporal Spatial with lanczos3 optimized upscaling 1080p 50hz -> 2160p 50hz without any frame drops (unless i was also browsing in Kodi GUI)
Interesting. I was running older Kodi+Ubuntu version before.