[johnnius]

First of all, I love XBMC. Shout out to the devs and community for an astounding project.

I'm running XBMC Live 9.04 install off a 1tb HD. Running a Athlon X2 5000 Black Edition, Mobo is a 780g chipset running HDMI direct to TV (No reciever). Also, only 1G of Ram (256 for video card, but top shows lots of free resources). Everything in effect works. Running FGLRX Drivers in 1080p without video tearing, audio is working over HDMI.

My problem is that at certain points of certain files, I start dropping frames, and it doesn't really recover. It just continues to drop frames and go out of A/V Sync until I stop the movie, and resume from where I stop.

I'm not expecting the system to never drop frames, but it should be able to catch back up and recover without me stopping.

I can play back some 720p mkv movies just fine. But others show this problem. It might play back fine for 5 mintues, maybe an hour, but it's always at the same points of the files (usually high action or scene changes).

Any suggestions?

[snowraver1]

Does this seem to be related to just .mkv files? If you have a 720P .avi file, does this problem happen then?

On another note, did you have to fiddle around to get audio VIA HDMI? My rig wouldn't do it; I had to use seperate audio cables to the TV.

[johnnius]

It seems to be strictly an ac3 issue, as this doesn't happen on standard dvd rips. but then again, that could be a processor usage thing.

There was a little tinkering. the trick is to have a correct asound.conf file.

mine looks like this

/etc/asound.conf

Code:

pcm.!default {

    type plug
    slave {
       pcm "hw:1,3"
       format S16_LE
       channels 2
       rate 48000
    }
}

that gives me audio for navigation and videos, as well as downsamples to 2 channels (no reciever, just the TV). I suspect the problem might be related to this configuration. When I was tinkering with my asound.conf file, I would get working audio, but much harsher frame dropping.

[johnnius]

Oh SNAP! You totally had it. That one movie that played perfectly was an AVI!

[johnnius]

Why does this only happen with Matroska files then?