[plugh]

Try setting the skin down to 720p (or 480p);

I had problem playing 25fps at 1080i, similar behaviour - playback wouldn't even start. It is the only HD xvid I've downloaded that would play with no frame drops; 6GB, 1280x528, 25fps, *3* AC3 streams (german, english, and uh something else). Don't know why; fine at 720p, won't start at 1080i.

[ultrabrutal]

It plays if the menu is at 720p, but not 1080i...

It's probably the same problem. Not "enough" memory for some reason.

Maybe it could be fixed by simply switch to video mode (720p), unload skin, start movie playback, but some dev needs to look at it

[plugh]

The skin/menu system seems very sluggish to me at 1080i, and I prefer the 'p' modes - no interlace flicker.

[ultrabrutal]

I have no flicker on my display which is 1366x768 native (50" plasma and 32" lcd). 720p is alittle blurred (scaled up in the display) but 1080i (scaled down in the display) looks much more sharp. This can be seen with the text in the menus but certainly also when viewing pictures. So therefore I prefer 1080i in the menu over 720p.

Only thing which does not look good at 1080i is the RSS feed, but I can either live with it or disable it.

[ultrabrutal]

Status:

Million Dollar Baby running 02:06:45 at 1280x528 25 fps with 5.1 Dolby Digital (AC3-384 kbps). Encoded with XBMC - SMB profile. AVI size: 3.93 GB (hard to hit 4 GB limit).
Played over SMB share with software audio decoding (to two channels), dropped only 3 frames. Average video bitrate is 4005 kbps.
Various services was disabled during playback (we need an option to stop all services automaticly during playback of 1280x material).

[kraqh3d]

according to your ealier log post, at the time xbmc needed to load mplayer.dll into memory, there was only 7M of free memory, and it needed 9M. it would have been interesting to see what was before that since after xbmc aborted playback, there was 21M free.

** edit **
i just thought of something. the new "switch to full screen" code could have an effect here. you could try using an svn version built before elupus put in that change as a test. (look at the log to figure out the rev number.)

[ultrabrutal]

kraqh3d: I do not have a setup for building XBMC myself so sadly not really possible. Also I deleted the file now since I can live with 3 frame drops with analog audio decoding during a whole movie.
Maybe you could add some more logging or elupus could around his new code to see if that's the theif...

[plugh]

I'm still "in recovery" from my HDTV failure and a hdd problem with my xbox, but once I finish sorting it all I'll see what I can find in my log file for this case.

BTW, I found another HD xvid 'killer'. Was upgrading the disk on a friend's xbox, copied some of my HD xvids to his new hdd, tweaked settings - and kept getting frame drops! Poked around and eventually noticed he had his LED set to 'cycle' - ah hah! another background thread sucking cpu cycles. Enabled the sub-option to turn LED off during playback, and no more drops.

So add this to the list of things to disable.

[ultrabrutal]

The log didnt show anything. On my LCD I could see 21 mb free before pressing A to start playing but in log it said 7 mb. 14 mb disappeared!

LED cycle - yikes I have my LED off hehe

Regarding stuff to disable, I made this post:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=23824

but no response at all

[plugh]

Hadn't seen that post - I'll review the list.

One thing I am pleasantly surprised at, is the 'hit' from auto fanspeed control is *almost* immeasurable. So given the importance of this to the health of the system (heavier cpu/gpu load during hd playback = more heat), I think this is one that can (should) be left enabled. But definitely all the background network related services (and LED cycling) should be turned off.

[ultrabrutal]

I totally agree about the fan option!

Now we just needs the attention of a dev to get this importent HD feature implemented

[plugh]

And for those people trying to play random 'downloaded 720p' xvids:

Stick with 1280x5xx (2.35:1) encodes.
Besides turning everything mentioned off,
UNrar it (playing from rars incurs a cpu hit),
play it from the local xbox hard disk,
use external audio decoding (digital audio).

You can also try Overlay video rather than HQ pixel shader,
but my test results are mixed, and colorspace might be 'off'.

Note: local fatx hdd has 4GB size limit so if what you download is larger,
you'll have to use a tool to split it up and use xbmc 'stacking'.

If you do all these, you MIGHT get acceptable playback (minimal frame drops).

Otherwise, you'll need to use my modified (fixed) xvid code and do the HD encode (with my "XBMC" profiles) yourself from a Transport Stream capture.

Unless, of course, you download one already encoded this way

[ultrabrutal]

DVD vs 4XBMC (HD) vs TS

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=24013

[jthunder]

plugh, do you think that you can create a new post that can be stickied or update the first post of the thread to point at the relevent posts?

I (and I'm sure others) are looking for the tools and steps used to re-encode the .ts files to the xbmc xvid profile, and a list of the xbmc options to turn-off to optimize memory and cpu.

Great work!

JT

[ultrabrutal]

jt, hang on. I'm working on a guide...