2018-04-06, 12:33
Note: This issue seems resolved for Intel based systems as of Beta3, or somewhere thereabouts. For Nvidia systems, a proper fix is only currently available in a test build from afedchin here. I'm using this test build on my Intel and Nvidia systems and playback is now extremely stable.
Well this is a weird one. After moving most of my machines over to v18 alpha/nightlies I noticed that video playback with hardware acceleration enabled was very choppy. Not constantly but quite frequently. Software rendering, while not perfect was far better with barely any stuttering. I decided to collect some debug logs so I could post a new thread about it but I found that as soon as I enabled debugging, the choppiness disappeared!
Thinking that the increased CPU load and disk activity associated with debug logging couldn't possibly be helping, the only thing that's different is the overlay you get with CPU usage/framerate etc. To test this theory, I installed MSI Afterburner which comes with RTSS. I set it up so that the OSD was enabled for Kodi and as desired, a little GPU usage overlay appeared in Kodi. As long as I leave this overlay enabled, hw accelerated playback is fine. The moment I disable it, even without restarting Kodi, the stuttering returns. Note that I am not applying an overclock with Afetburner, it seems that's not even possible on an Intel chip, this is just the overlay being enabled, nothing more.
I've resorted to setting RTSS to load at startup and then moved the OSD to the bottom right, made it black and the smallest possible font so now it's barely visible, and this has solved the problem. This is all on an Intel NUC i3 (Intel HD4000 graphics) on Win10 1709 x64. Any thoughts?
Well this is a weird one. After moving most of my machines over to v18 alpha/nightlies I noticed that video playback with hardware acceleration enabled was very choppy. Not constantly but quite frequently. Software rendering, while not perfect was far better with barely any stuttering. I decided to collect some debug logs so I could post a new thread about it but I found that as soon as I enabled debugging, the choppiness disappeared!
Thinking that the increased CPU load and disk activity associated with debug logging couldn't possibly be helping, the only thing that's different is the overlay you get with CPU usage/framerate etc. To test this theory, I installed MSI Afterburner which comes with RTSS. I set it up so that the OSD was enabled for Kodi and as desired, a little GPU usage overlay appeared in Kodi. As long as I leave this overlay enabled, hw accelerated playback is fine. The moment I disable it, even without restarting Kodi, the stuttering returns. Note that I am not applying an overclock with Afetburner, it seems that's not even possible on an Intel chip, this is just the overlay being enabled, nothing more.
I've resorted to setting RTSS to load at startup and then moved the OSD to the bottom right, made it black and the smallest possible font so now it's barely visible, and this has solved the problem. This is all on an Intel NUC i3 (Intel HD4000 graphics) on Win10 1709 x64. Any thoughts?
