Severe Performance Problem with Large File (28 GB)

1st Official Post

    I'm looking for some help in figuring out what is causing some massive stuttering on a large file. I haven't been able to nail down the culprit.

    I have an Intel NUC (BOXD34010WYKH1) that I bought in 2014, and it has worked perfectly. I have typically compressed my files via h.264, but recently we got a bunch of new movies which I've ripped with MakeMKV, but have not yet encoded.

    One of those files (My Little Pony, the Movie) is large uncompressed (28 GB). The playback (libreelec 8.2.4) stutters hard, and practically doesn't play. Getting the playback details reveals that frames are skipping, but I can't tell why.

    CPU utilization seems similar between this movie and others that play fine. (1 CPU at 100%, another at 75-100%, the others less than 10%).

    I have verified that the NUC is getting gigabit speeds. (Tested speed from Desktop to NUC, and Desktop to NAS - both clocked in at more than 400 Mbps)

    I think I have the video decoding stuff set right - I haven't changed much there.

    The only think significant I've adjusted is in getting a new receiver and a libreelec update to 8.2.4. Within the recent history, audio passthrough is disabled, so I'm decoding that on the NUC now, I believe...

    Help!

    Thanks!

    (Father of twin 4 year olds who WANT THEIR PONIES BACK!);(

    • Official Post

    I'd guess (and with no Kodi debug log guessing is all we can do) that the ISO RIP is using a native uncompressed codec/format that your older NUC device cannot hardware decode, and it doesn't have enough CPU grunt to cope with software decoding. Compress to H.264 which will be harware decoded and it shouldn't skip.

    Quote from chewitt

    I'd guess (and with no Kodi debug log guessing is all we can do) that the ISO RIP is using a native uncompressed codec/format that your older NUC device cannot hardware decode, and it doesn't have enough CPU grunt to cope with software decoding. Compress to H.264 which will be harware decoded and it shouldn't skip.

    Here's the Debug Log. (Sorry, it's been a while).

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    If I remember correctly, this machine used to do straight decoding. (Once I started ripping, it took a while for me to go back and encode everything)...

    Are you able to tell from the Debug Log whether this is the issue?

    There's a lot of logging before turning on Debugging. Then with Debug on, I started My Little Pony and let it run for a while...

    Thanks!

    • Official Post

    I can see remains of an older OE install in the logs and there's some odd VAAPI errors so I'd SSH in and stop Kodi, rename /storage/.kodi out of the way and then wget a Kodi 18 development (milhouse) build .tar file to /storage/.update - then the box will update itself and restart with clean Kodi defaults. If it now works it's either a bug resolved in newer drivers (or Kodi) or bad config on the Krypton install. If you stick on Leia you can do some stop/move/restart to restore essential files (sources.xml, thumbs and DB's) before reinstalling add-ons.

    Thanks Chewitt. Some how, it resolved itself. It turns out, I was having some trouble with my MythTV server - so not sure if those RunHouseKeeping calls were the real culprit or not... But, Kodi was better some time after I corrected MythTV. I keep this bookmarked for the future for a clean install, but would prefer not to as there are some custom settings (keymappings in particular) that I need to keep to ensure this thing keeps running for the Boss.

    Thank you for looking into it!