I only recently started playing around with the 'sync video to display' feature. I had a wrong setting in my xorg.conf which cause the whole thing to crash whenever I wanted to try it out.
I copied the xorg.conf from one of the developers and it works fine
I've tried all 3 modes and the one that works for me is the 'video clock (resample audio) mode.
However, recently the option to select the quality of the audio resampling has disappeared from the GUI. It's now set to medium.
Yesterday I did a lot of testing by switching between using the audio clock (thus not resampling) and using the video clock and resampling. To me it sounds flat and less dynamic when resampling the audio.
Problem is the video clock with audio resampling gives the best smooth playback. In fact I haven't seen it stutter one single time in this mode. It does from time to time when using audio clock.
What I've done is to have the following in advancedsettings.xml to set it to high instead of medium.
<videoplayer>
<resamplequality>2</resamplequality>
</videoplayer>
valid values are: 0=low,1=medium,2=high,3=very high
It only increases the load on my slow Celeron 430 by 5-10% tops.
If I set it to very high (value of 3) it loads my CPU to the max. So that's not an option for me.Also I can't hear any difference
Can anyone else please try to test if they have a noticeable difference in the audio quality ?
Maybe the option to change it could be brought back or it could be set to high as default ?
I'm using resample audio and I don't notice any drop in audio quality. Then again I'm only outputting the audio via HDMI to my TVs speakers - I don't have seperate speakers. (resample audio does not work with a passthrough anyway).
From what I understand there is a slight drop in audio quality when using resample audio, but it should not be noticable in normal circumstances.
cejstrup Wrote:I only recently started playing around with the 'sync video to display' feature. I had a wrong setting in my xorg.conf which cause the whole thing to crash whenever I wanted to try it out.
I copied the xorg.conf from one of the developers and it works fine
I've tried all 3 modes and the one that works for me is the 'video clock (resample audio) mode.
However, recently the option to select the quality of the audio resampling has disappeared from the GUI. It's now set to medium.
Yesterday I did a lot of testing by switching between using the audio clock (thus not resampling) and using the video clock and resampling. To me it sounds flat and less dynamic when resampling the audio.
Problem is the video clock with audio resampling gives the best smooth playback. In fact I haven't seen it stutter one single time in this mode. It does from time to time when using audio clock.
What I've done is to have the following in advancedsettings.xml to set it to high instead of medium.
<videoplayer>
<resamplequality>2</resamplequality>
</videoplayer>
valid values are: 0=low,1=medium,2=high,3=very high
It only increases the load on my slow Celeron 430 by 5-10% tops.
If I set it to very high (value of 3) it loads my CPU to the max. So that's not an option for me.Also I can't hear any difference
Can anyone else please try to test if they have a noticeable difference in the audio quality ?
Maybe the option to change it could be brought back or it could be set to high as default ?
Wondered where that option had gone. I all ways used to have it on very high before.
So to turn it up I do this
Create a file ~/.xbmc/userdata/Advancedsettings.xml
and enter this
<advancedsettings>
<videoplayer>
<resamplequality>3</resamplequality>
</videoplayer>
</advancedsettings>
Is that correct. As it seem to have little effect on cpu usage , mines a e2160 @2.4Ghz and its uses about 10% on each core
EDIT ~/.xbmc/userdata/
Advancedsettings.xml is wrong...needs to be a lower case a. And yes Now I`m getting 50% usage on one core 10% on the other.
Slightly OT. If you are using the resample audio, there is a side effect in some movies, ( to which I cant quite pin down why ) you sometimes get a pitch change in the soundtrack.
Have you noticed this ?
i'm curious; what do you think resampling audio means
Bagger - a pitch change is to be expected.
e.g - if you are playing back a 23.97fps movie using resample audio at 25fps, then that represents a speed increase of approx 4%. Probably not immediately noticable unless you have good music ears. Obviously if you are running files and resampling to a higher framerate (e.g 30fps), then you'll get much more of a pitch shift.
I use resample audio to playback 23.97fps at 25fps, as my TV does not support 24p. Personally I can't notice any different with the audio in terms of pitch shift etc.
Bagger Wrote:Wondered where that option had gone. I all ways used to have it on very high before.
So to turn it up I do this
Create a file ~/.xbmc/userdata/Advancedsettings.xml
and enter this
<advancedsettings>
<videoplayer>
<resamplequality>3</resamplequality>
</videoplayer>
</advancedsettings>
Is that correct. As it seem to have little effect on cpu usage , mines a e2160 @2.4Ghz and its uses about 10% on each core
EDIT ~/.xbmc/userdata/Advancedsettings.xml is wrong...needs to be a lower case a. And yes Now I`m getting 50% usage on one core 10% on the other.
Slightly OT. If you are using the resample audio, there is a side effect in some movies, ( to which I cant quite pin down why ) you sometimes get a pitch change in the soundtrack.
Have you noticed this ?
The file name needs to be all lower case. After starting xbmc you'll see this line in your xbmc.log file:
NOTICE: Contents of special://profile/advancedsettings.xml are...
Yes,I've noticed some pitch changes but only once or twice. It hasn't been something that I've seen as a problem..Yet..But I'm quite new to this sync to display feature. If it becomes a problem I'll disable it again
chrisinthesun Wrote:Bagger - a pitch change is to be expected.
e.g - if you are playing back a 23.97fps movie using resample audio at 25fps, then that represents a speed increase of approx 4%. Probably not immediately noticable unless you have good music ears. Obviously if you are running files and resampling to a higher framerate (e.g 30fps), then you'll get much more of a pitch shift.
I use resample audio to playback 23.97fps at 25fps, as my TV does not support 24p. Personally I can't notice any different with the audio in terms of pitch shift etc.
Chris: what I think Bagger means is that there's small changes in the pitch. A constantly changed pitch will not be easily noticeable. However these small pitch changes are very audible. But I've only noticed them 2 times or so.
I'll see if I can locate the movie scene which had it and reproduce the problem
chrisinthesun Wrote:Bagger - a pitch change is to be expected.
e.g - if you are playing back a 23.97fps movie using resample audio at 25fps, then that represents a speed increase of approx 4%. Probably not immediately noticable unless you have good music ears. Obviously if you are running files and resampling to a higher framerate (e.g 30fps), then you'll get much more of a pitch shift.
I use resample audio to playback 23.97fps at 25fps, as my TV does not support 24p. Personally I can't notice any different with the audio in terms of pitch shift etc.
Yes I understand all that and thats the same reason I'm using the resample my tv doesn support 24fps without judder.
The pitch change I mean is it goes low then high (in the space of a second) a few times during the movie.
all my movies are 24fps mkv's. and some are worse than others.
Bagger Wrote:Yes I understand all that and thats the same reason I'm using the resample my tv doesn support 24fps without judder.
The pitch change I mean is it goes low then high (in the space of a second) a few times during the movie.
all my movies are 24fps mkv's. and some are worse than others.
Ah gotcha.
Not experienced it myself, however if you pin down a file where this effect is reproducable, I'd be interested to try it myself.
That's usually because of broken timestamps in the file.
bobo1on1 Wrote:That's usually because of broken timestamps in the file.
Ahh, I see. These broken time stamps wouldn't effect normal playback ?( ie no audio resample ) because they do seem to play fine if I let it play at its native frame rate.
Without resampling they make the video jerk a little, which is far less noticable than a pitch change.
Bagger: I found a tool to fix mkv files. It might fix the timestamp issues ? You can try it out and let us know how it goes:
http://meteorite.sourceforge.net/
It creates a copy of the file prefixed with 'meteorite' so don't worry it won't mess up the original file
I'm still searching for the file that gave me problems and I'll try it on that (if I succeed in locating it )
bobo1on1 Wrote:That's usually because of broken timestamps in the file.
bobo1on1 Wrote:Without resampling they make the video jerk a little, which is far less noticable than a pitch change.
Thanks. Yes that's exactly right, re-done one of the problem films and now plays spot on. It was just a little confusing that it was OK before I turned on resample. Seems I was pointing the finger in the wrong direction.
Thanks again for putting me straight.
cejstrup Wrote:Bagger: I found a tool to fix mkv files. It might fix the timestamp issues ? You can try it out and let us know how it goes:
http://meteorite.sourceforge.net/
It creates a copy of the file prefixed with 'meteorite' so don't worry it won't mess up the original file
I'm still searching for the file that gave me problems and I'll try it on that (if I succeed in locating it )
Thats something worth looking into as well, save redoing them
cejstrup Wrote:Bagger: I found a tool to fix mkv files. It might fix the timestamp issues ? You can try it out and let us know how it goes:
http://meteorite.sourceforge.net/
It creates a copy of the file prefixed with 'meteorite' so don't worry it won't mess up the original file
I'm still searching for the file that gave me problems and I'll try it on that (if I succeed in locating it )
Too bad this tool does not fix the problem for my movies.
They still have the random pitches and that is really annoying.
How can these broken timestamps be fixed?