[SleepyP]

I'm having some problems figuring out what's causing this. During playback of HD movies in either x264 or h264 formats, periodically its like the playback "hesitates", for lack of a better word. It doesn't seem to happen with any consistency. It doesn't seem to be an obvious case like scenes with lots of motion and/or high bit rates. Also it doesn't matter if the files are being played from a local harddrive or streamed over my Gigabit LAN. Its almost as if something else is happening in the background on the system which is holding up XBMC. Any ideas what could be causing this and/or how I can smooth out HD playback?

I'm outputting to a display running at 1360x768@60Hz. This system is built around an Intel Core 2 Quad running @ 2.0 GHz with 4 GB of RAM on a G33 Express chipset. Could it simply be a case of bitrate?

[harryzimm]

Is the source 720p or 1080p? What bitrate? 2ghz is to slow for most 1080p rips.

[quake101]

I have this same issue, it seems like every other player (vlc, totem, mplayer) does not have this issue. I also noticed A LOT of threads about this same thing. I really think the dvdplayer in XBMC needs some major updates. IMHO XBMC is flawless until you use the dvdplayer.

I would like to say, I'm not trying to stir the pot or anything, I love XBMC and it's the best media center out there. I just think at this point the dvdplayer should be the focus of the project.

[althekiller]

Prolly just dropping frames, turn on the codec info and you'll see the "dropped" field increase when the video "hesitates".

[quake101]

Prolly just dropping frames, turn on the codec info and you'll see the "dropped" field increase when the video "hesitates".

Why does it seem that XBMC drops more frames then other players? :confused2:

[althekiller]

We probably do, the code is far from mature. Help out, be patient, or use something else. These are your only options.

[SleepyP]

what's weird is I've noticed this on some Xvid HDTV rips I was watching last night. They're like 720P and low motion (the show 30 Rock), so I dunno what the hell is causing it
I guess I'll wait and see what else happens. XBMC does the best job when it comes to what I use it for, which is not ~JUST~ a media player. I'll try running my CPU at a higher clock rate and some other things. I was underclocking it a bit as an experiment to see if clock rate has any effect. I can easily get it up to 2.8GHz, so we'll see how that works with the same files (HELLO HD Dark Knight!!!)