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+---- Thread: Win Buffering/Stuttering (/showthread.php?tid=157963)
Buffering/Stuttering - Huxy - 2013-03-01
I've been running XBMC on various platforms, RPi, Linux and Windows. I have a slight issue which seems to be slightly intermittent but annoying. Often when watching the stream it will briefly stutter and buffer. Sometimes this will be rare, other times it might have a funny five minutes and do it every min or so.
On my main PC, the problem doesn't seem to happen, but on my HTPC and my RPi it often does. Additionally, sometimes there's also a little breakup in the picture quality, but not necessarily at the same time as the buffering. The interesting thing is that the problem does not reproduce when using the MediaPortal Client, either locally or across the network, which makes me think its XBMC causing the issues.
Has anyone similar issues?
The stream's I see the problem on the most are the 1080i live streams. Checking the CPU usage shows 30% to 40% across cores.
Could it be a weak GPU causing the issues?
RE: Buffering/Stuttering - skiboysteve - 2013-03-06
I have the exact same issue when using my raspberry pi
RE: Buffering/Stuttering - margro - 2013-03-06
Can't help you with RPi related problems because I don't have a RPi and furthermore, I'm still not convinced that it is powerful enough for PVR based Live-TV.
Also, the current RPi player in XBMC seems to have quite some playback problems unrelated to the PVR addon. (See also the discussions in this TVHeadend forum thread).
@Huxy: enable XBMC debug logging and check your XBMC.log file for hints from the PVR addon.
Buffering problems are typically buffer underflows for reading the timeshift buffer file and sometimes related to busy network connections or wireless connections.
RE: Buffering/Stuttering - bluewizard - 2013-03-07
I have a Pi and it will play SD TV fine but will not play HD. It will stutter and eventually stop. I use MediaPortal as the back-end. I also have installed RaspBMC. There are other versions of XBMC for the Pi but I find this to be the fastest version with a nice little tweaks menu. The Pi is a great bit of kit but it is low powered. I try not to expect too much.
Huxy & skiboysteve... you both have purchased the codec packs from the RaspberryPi main site... yes? Without it, you would have certainly have issues playing most content. If not you can purchase from here: http://www.raspberrypi.com/
RE: Buffering/Stuttering - skiboysteve - 2013-03-07
Yeah I have the codec pack. My tuner only does mpeg2 so it's required.
I can play recorded HD content... But live HD content stutters. So it isn't a CPU issue
RE: Buffering/Stuttering - bluewizard - 2013-03-07
Technically the PI can do 1080p but mine is the same as yours. Pre-recorded HD stuff mostly will play OK but live HD tv won't.
What have your tried?I've clocked the CPU and GPU but it doesn't make any difference.
I suspect its something to do with bit-rate but Im not an expert on that. The machine locks up so I don't think its network bandwidth. The problem with the Pi is that I don't think there is any way to analyse what is happening