[voip-ninja]

Joined the bandwagon and went ahead and bought myself i5 NUC. Loaded up with OpenElec and configured it with Aeon MQ5. Moving from Pi, the skin is pretty awesome and menus are much more faster. Have gone through most of this thread. The only issue I didn't fully understand was the black getting crushed and the workarounds related to using xrandr etc. I am not using that right now and I have enabled Hardware Acceleration for now. I am seeing drops: 2-4 and skips: 8-10 and sometimes pc:1 when I hit o while playing content. First I wanted to know whether this is normal. I searched many threads and I believe it is fine it is what I understood. But wanted to double check. Also my home videos using Canon (in HDMV format) show a lot of more skips in the start and then they stabilize.

I can share the media codec info and other logs if needed if somebody can point me to the direction on what logs are required. Right now playing all content over a wired network (gigabit through) and using NFS to stream from my NAS DLINK DNS323 and QNAP.

Interestingly I don't know how to figure out drops in Raspberry Pi since those values aren't present in the 4th line. Also there I was using the Helix builds and updating quite regularly. Any help will be appreciated.

Unless the picture looks poor there is no reason to mess with xrandr. The default output with OE and Intel hardware is acceptable although arguably it can be improved by changing the way that the video output is handled in the OS. Some displays are more problematic with others. With my Panasonic plasma the PQ was noticeably worse than it had been when using older ATI based hardware, so I had to mess around with xrandr to improve it.

Frame drops/skips during start of playback is totally normal. It is only a problem if you either visually notice frame drops occurring or you see the skip/drop counter incrementing during normal (not chapter skip or ff/rew) playback.