[robca]

I changed as per your suggestion the video settings to 1080i/29.97 (since the mpeg video is encoded that way: here's the analysis of the video I played: http://pastebin.com/BFiUspyx). After changing he settings, the frequency of the problem has decreased dramatically (from a couple of times every 2 hours to once in 3-4), but it's still there... Did I change the right settings?

Kodi's output resolution should be 1080p59.97 (or 60). 1080i60 content needs to be deinterlaced to 1080p60, not do some weird field drops to get 1080p30. Ensure

while the video is playing, bring up the video settings menu and set Deinterlacing to auto, type to Motion Compensated, and scaling to Bilinear; then save as default at the bottom of the settings menu.

Thanks again for looking into this. I changed the output to 1080p58.94, and deinterlacing to Motion Compensated (VAAPI). The problem got much worse, happening roughly three times as frequently. Reverting deinterlacing back to Auto Select makes things better (still freezes from time to time, but same as before). With motion compensated once I could not recover from the problem (had to reboot, otherwise no video would play no matter what I tried), another time Kodi restarted behind the scenes (black screen with a mouse pointer, Kodi startup screen, then back to the home page UI)

I noticed that when the video freezes, if I press Display I get a debugging-like display overlayed, and that shows one of the 2 CPUs pegged at 100%, the other around 10-15%. Most frequently it's CPU1, but can also be CPU0 pegged. During normal playback, both CPUs hover between 8% and 20%, roughly, and while fast forwarding 16x, both are around 30-40%

Anything else worth trying?