Raspberry Pi 3B+: HEVC, overclock...

    The thermal pad of my Flirc v1 case is gone: impossible to recycle it from my previous Pi.
    I haven't another thermal pad, but I noticed that if I try to use it, the case doesn't fit very well due to the thickness.
    So I decided to put some drops of my CPU thermal compound (Arctic MX-4) on the IHS and seems that it works for now.

    Maximum 50°C during movie playing (HEVC x265 8-bit 1920x800 pixel) with 20°C room temperature and this settings:

    Code
    total_mem=1024
arm_freq=1400
gpu_freq=500
over_voltage=2
sdram_freq=580
over_voltage_sdram=5
sdram_schmoo=0x02000020
dtparam=sd_overclock=100

    For now I don't see difference in media center use compared to my overclocked Pi3 (arm_freq=1300 gpu_freq=500 core_freq=500 sdram_freq=500 sdram_schmoo=0x02000020 over_voltage=2 sdram_over_voltage=2 dtparam=sd_overclock=100).

    Pi 3 B+ is unable to play my critical video (same as Pi3):

    • VC-1 movie 1920x1080 pixel 8-bit color depth is stuttering (I just bought the decoder code...)
    • HEVC (x265) movie 1920x1072 pixel 10-bit doesn't start (I see the play icon on the right top of the screen but nothing appens: only the system slows down).
    Quote from lollo78
    • HEVC (x265) movie 1920x1072 pixel 10-bit doesn't start (I see the play icon on the right top of the screen but nothing appens: only the system slows down).

    You need Kodi 18 / LE 9 to play 10-bit HEVC.

    Not sure why VC-1 movie is stuttering. VC-1 should work fine as long as you applied the decoder code.

    Thanks smp, now I understood why... I'm on LE 8.2.4.

    VC-1 works fine on my pi3 with the decoding code.

    I am waiting to receive the code for the new Pi3 B+ in my e-mail to solve the problem.

    I was hoping the new CPU could be able to play VC-1 without it ;)

    MPEG-2 (like DVB-T) in FullHD, works fine even without decoding code (but I bought it anyway).

    Quote from milhouse

    I don't have an extensive library of HEVC material but everything I've tried has played flawlessly. Sorry.

    Hi milhouse,

    I have a DVB-T2 recording in 1080p HEVC, which encounters drops and skips during playback on RPi 3B+. I tried your recommended overclock settings. It helped to reduce the drops, but not fully. I run LE 9 night build #0328.

    Here is a sample (45MB), so you can try. At the beginning it plays smoothly (slow motion), but later on I experience drops (fast motion). Any idea, what could be tuned to get smooth playback? The bitrate doesn't look big. Also CPU doesn't look like to be used at max. HEVC samples from Jellyfish Bitrate Test Files for 10 mbps bitrate can max out RPi CPU to 100% for all cores momentarily and still without drops. So I am wondering where is the actual bottleneck.

    Thanks,

    Keny

    The sample doesn't play at all in VLC for Windows (or Windows Media Player) so there may be some encoding issues.

    On my Pi3+ system all seemed OK until the fat guy wearing #64 jumped on the other guys head at 20-21 seconds, at which point frames started to be dropped. Not sure why - the video is 1080@50 so maybe the bit rate is too much, or more encodiing errors.

    Quote from keny

    The bitrate doesn't look big. Also CPU doesn't look like to be used at max. HEVC samples from Jellyfish Bitrate Test Files for 10 mbps bitrate can max out RPi CPU to 100% for all cores momentarily and still without drops. So I am wondering where is the actual bottleneck.

    Jellyfish samples are 29.97 fps. Your DVB recording is 50 fps. The bottleneck is probably the GPU or RAM speed (or both).

    Quote from smp

    It plays fine here (VLC for Windows).

    VLC 2.2.6 on Windows 7 - all I get is one frozen frame of video but the audio plays normally.


    With Windows Media Player it plays only the audio, no video at all.

    Maybe I'm missing a codec or something.

    I don't think it is enconding issue, because non-overclocked RPi experiences more drops than overclocked one.

    My VLC also stucks at one frame, but I believe it is because of slow laptop (CPU is at max.).