Kodi Community Forum

I've done a lot searching over the past couple months, and have not been able to find a decent solution for my current hardware. I'm thinking I just need a different video card. I've read that the nvidia 9400 series is recommended, so I'm looking at this card..

GIGABYTE GV-N94TOC-1GI GeForce 9400 GT 1GB 128-bit GDDR2 (links to newegg)

Before I buy, I just want to make sure I need it. I've listed my system specs below. I run XBMC on ubuntu (no gui) and do mild-downloading in the background. I'm using digital audio, and the remote works great. I've got the Aeon skin as well. When I play a 1080p movie, the debug info has VQ staying max'ed at 99% the majority of the time. That's when video gets choppy. When it lowers, of course, the videos fine. I've tried to find out what VQ tells me, but I haven't had much luck with that. I'm aware that FFMpeg doesn't do multithreding. The highest I saw any of the cores get was 85% (Staying mostly 50-70). From what I've read with the correct video card, you can off-load a lot of the work from the cpu. The thing is, the video card I have should be plenty for 1080p. I had windows installed at one point with XBMC, and it worked fine on there.... but I need linux! I have onboard HDMI as well, that handled 720p pretty good. So any suggestions? (I'm new to posting!)

:: SOFTWARE ::
Ubuntu Januty 9.04
XBMC 9.40.1 r20654 (installed via apt-get)

:: HARDWARE ::
AMD Phenom 9500
2gb DDR2 800 (Usually has 1.4gb free)
MB: EVGA 113-M2-E113 AM2+/AM2 NVIDIA nForce 730a (links to newegg)
Vid: XFX PVT71PUDD3 GeForce 7900GS 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 (also links to newegg)

VQ maxed is not a bad thing. VQ is the video demuxer queue. AQ is the audio demuxer queue. If one queue drops to zero, then it can starve the other and that's when you start getting bad things happening (like skips). So as long as VQ/AQ are filled or full, that's perfectly fine.

In your case, the question would be, what is AQ doing ?

The nvidia 9400 will offload ALL decoding to the GPU if vdpau is used. Typically I see less than 10 percent (on a dual-core atom) for h.264 1080p with any encoding profile, VC1 will increase that to 20-25 percent cpu.

You could post a debug log when you are playing 1080 content.
Then paste the log file on pastebin or something else.

Thank you for the explanation of VQ & AQ, that was very helpful! I found the log file and used pastebin as suggested http://pastebin.com/m70ef23b3. I narrowed down to the loading of video, so hopefully that helps!

I was reading up on VDPAU, and according to wikipedia... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDPAU it's supported by the the 8200 series. My motherboard has an onboard GeForce 8200. Could this be used? You said IF VDPAU is used, which would imply I might not be using it. I'll see if I can figure out whether I am or not and let you know. THANKS!!

Complete Debug Log please...

Exactly. Full debug log.

Also, you should use VDPAU if your card supports it. Otherwise, you have little hope of playing real 1080p.

Well, believe it or not... I switched to the onboard hdmi out, enabled VDPAU and it worked beautifully! Full smooth 1080p with digital audio out! It does slow up if you have subtitles enabled or you bring the menu up, but from what I've read that's normal. I'm impressed. Glad my money wasn't wasted. I got super lucky that the board I got supported VDPAU! So that solves it I guess. I appreciate all your guys time. If I have future issues, I'll be sure to post the full debug log.