[Blue Dude]

After searching this forum, it seems there used to be a feature in Kodi that would perform the required reclocking of sped-up PAL videos to 23.976 Hz and also resample the audio to maintain sync and restore the correct pitch. Is this one of those things that looked good in theory but failed in practice, or was it a victim of internal code rewrites that made it too hard to reimplement? Or is there some other reason it's just not feasible?

In any case, I have a number of PAL videos (ripped from European Blu-rays) that suffer from PAL speedup and though I don't have perfect pitch, the half step and tempo increases are bothersome since I'm familiar with the original music on the programs. I've looked into fixing the videos by adjusting the video headers manually, resampling the audio, and remuxing, etc. but yikes, it's tedious. It sure would be nice to see if it could be done on the fly at the playback end in Kodi. For what it's worth, I am running v17.4 on Windows. Any ideas?

[FernetMenta]

It's called "sync plaback to display" aka smooth video and it is still there.

[Blue Dude]

I have tried this setting but it doesn't seem to solve my problem, I'm guessing because the video is encoded at 50i, not 25p.

I have two displays, one capable of 50 Hz display and one not. Sync to display simply shows the program at 50 Hz on the one and won't output a valid signal on the other. Is this supposed to work in conjunction with other settings to slow the video to its corrected rate?

Correcting PAL speedup implies recognizing a 50i signal as 25p and reclocking to 24p (or 23.976p) and possibly repeating frames to output again at 60i(59.94i) if required. At the same time, it must not just resample the audio to match but lower the pitch as well by the same percentage.

[FernetMenta]

Kodi only changes the speed of the video if video fps and display refresh rate diff is below 5%. If you play some 23.976 video on a 50Hz display, this is speed up by 4%. If you play a 25/50 fps video on a 60hz display, Kodi keeps the original speed. Some video frames may be duplicated every now and then. Audio stays unchanged.

[Blue Dude]

Hm. It sounds as though I'm stuck then, unless there's a way to force output at 25p instead of 50i, so that the sync feature would capture it and bend it down to 23.976.

Is there a technical or design reason that would prevent a discrete PAL slowdown setting from being considered? Specifically, the feature would process 50i video as 25p, then slow it to 23.976p, while maintaining audio sync by slowing and lowering pitch. Subtitles and chapter stops would be preserved as well. I wouldn't mind starting work on one but only if it was something that would be considered for the main project instead of a private fork.

[FernetMenta]

Is there a technical or design reason that would prevent a discrete PAL slowdown setting from being considered? Specifically, the feature would process 50i video as 25p, then slow it to 23.976p, while maintaining audio sync by slowing and lowering pitch. Subtitles and chapter stops would be preserved as well. I wouldn't mind starting work on one but only if it was something that would be considered for the main project instead of a private fork.

Most if not all bits are already in place. If you choose blendind for de-interlacing, VideoPlayer outputs 25fps. Now you need to force display switching to 23.976. It may work with an override in andanced settings.