Video stutter 25Hz Videoplayback with Hardwaredecoding Libreelec 9.0

  • Just apply the workaround in this thread and the stuttering is gone: Video stutter 25Hz Videoplayback with Hardwaredecoding Libreelec 9.0

    And it is not a Kodi issue, it is a Kernel issure afaik. And to be honest i would not switch to Kodi 19, its okay for testing but far away from a "daily driver" system.

    Already applied that. GPU frequency is 750 MHz during playback (just checked again to make sure) but 25fps videos are still stuttering very much...

  • I joined to also post that none of these fixes worked on braswell

    have rolled back to 8.2.5

    No Problem Here ASRock n3700m with 9.23 ,build it for a friend years ago as AIO HTPC with dual TV Tuners 240 SSD and 4TB HD. First with a nv gt730 since KODi 18 with onboard GPU.

    Only two Things...

    1. i had to use DVI to HDMI cable instead of the HDMI port to get the Audio working.

    2. The onboard GPU Had Problems with mcdi and Lanczos3.

    But yes Video was somewhat smoother in 8.25 and didn't stutter running in Background while browsing in the library.

    Regards

    Nicolas

  • I managed to get an old Dell 9020m with an i5-4590T and HD Graphics 4600. I need to use an DP -> HDMI adapter but I will give it another try with the latest LE. I pretty much gave up on this issue with my NUC. As mentioned before everything is running fine on Kodi 17.6 / LE 8.2.5, totally smooth.

  • daghy

    Did you try a fresh/clean Install?

    Maybe you have some "leftovers" in your old Setup/Backup/restore... Had this on 2 installations from 8 to 9...

    Is only 25hz playback the Problem?

    Is the system Volume okay?

    A faulty USB Stick or SD Card can cause Strange behavior.

    Regards

    Nicolas

  • Yes, I did several fresh installs on SD Card, USB sticks and internal SSD. There are no leftovers whatsoever. I still believe there are issues with the specific NUC hardware and the kernel.

    • Official Post

    I created 4 partition sets for 4 LibreELEC testing environments. That should be enough for now... :cool:

    With the latest Milhouse build, all things seem a bit more fluent on my Intel box.

    I haven't viewed any true 25fps videos, but that will be the next step.

  • I think there are just not enough NUC users at all to make this issue relevant.

    maybe you try another TvHeadend - if you are using TvH at all and see your bug only on TV material.

    see:

    Kodi crashes watching Sat-TV · Issue #17531 · xbmc/xbmc · GitHub

    and there comment from 20 Jun..

    I currently don't know if I got this bugs on 25fps material or on all.

    - btw: reporter sixpack58 is me (too) -

    I've tried all workaround mentioned here and elsewhere, but with no effort.

    Only TvH 4.3 fixed it. Seems curious, but artefacts are mostly and crashes are completely gone.

    - I hope we get an more current kernel with the next LE release, cause there went a lot of fixes for i915 in -

    see: drm-intel - Linux driver for Intel graphics

    P.S.

    I didn't read the complete thread, but 2 questions:

    Do you see stuttering with movies from TV (SAT, ...) only or from local movies or both.

    Why do I ask ?

    I saw artefacts only on TV material (SAT-TV), not on local movies.

    what indicates to me that the GPU (HW and all the involved software) isn't the culprit (alone).

    What's also curious:

    the boxed needed to play constant ~20 minutes to show the first artefacts and then the subsequent crash...

    Do you see such an behavior too ?

    Edited 4 times, last by GDPR-7 (July 21, 2020 at 9:01 PM).

  • I have a Intel NUC6CAYH and years ago stuttering did not occur, with every new LE version stuttering seems worse. The old video drivers were just good enough but the current do not work well with Intel NUC. It's a frustrating experience since one expects better perfomance with each new release and not worse...

  • So did it get any better with LibreELEC nightly builds? In a couple of months Kodi 19 should be ready so I am asking the alpha and beta testers if it's still stuttering on Intel NUCs w/ 25Hz content.

  • So did it get any better with LibreELEC nightly builds? In a couple of months Kodi 19 should be ready so I am asking the alpha and beta testers if it's still stuttering on Intel NUCs w/ 25Hz content.

    I'm currently running LE nightly on a RPi4 2GB, CPU overclocked to 2 GHz. Not sure how much of this applies to Intel NUCs, though.

    With DRM Prime decoder, Hardware Acceleration and HQ Scalers enabled, i haven't yet experienced any stuttering.

    With DRM Prime & Hardware Acceleration disabled, i need to disable HQ Scaling for smooth playback - the CPU obviously can't keep up with both software-decoding and CPU-intensive scalers.

    One quirk that still bugs me is that slowdown of PAL material to 24 FPS doesn't work right now. With earlier versions (don't remember wich, but definitely pre-Leia) this was possible by enabling Sync Playback to Display, whitelisting 24 and/or 23.76 FPS refresh rates but disabling 25 FPS.

    At least with current stable and nightly builds, this behavior seems to have changed. Even if i set an override in advancedsettings.xml, there's one frame being dropped every second instead of the video being slowed down to 24 FPS.

    Other than that, everything plays smooth for me.

    Also, the brief stuttering when the OSD fades in/out is gone in recent nightly builds.

  • So did it get any better with LibreELEC nightly builds? In a couple of months Kodi 19 should be ready so I am asking the alpha and beta testers if it's still stuttering on Intel NUCs w/ 25Hz content.

    from my side: a clearly NO.

    my last two comments are still valid.

    my last tests with the last nightly's on an usb-stick installed during the last 2-3 week revealed that the screen (not the whole box) is crashing.

    I guess it's cause there is no nightly tvheadend (see comment #84 and #82) for LE nightly to test with.

    Sat-TV runs fine for ~20-30 minutes with some small amount of artefacts (2-3).

    then suddenly the screen goes black and never comes back, audio is still running.

    I need to stop the play and restart, then after a further ~30 minutes I see the next black screen and so on.

    running tail -f <log files> I see a increasing number of "Continuity counter error" from 1 to ~50 during 5 minutes, then the screen crashes.

    LE release with an nightly tvheadend runs fine without artefacts on the same environment and I guess with the same amount of "Continuity error".

    I haven't reported it since now, cause there is already a simular report. [1]

    daily reading the git's of LE, Kodi, Tvheadend, ..., and testing nightly from time to time I'm waiting for a nightly tvheadend for the nightly LE. I've read there will be one, but the new year is still young ...

    that's said:

    it shouldn't hold you off to test nightly yourself, maybe your problem is apart from mine.

    otherwise we should start an petition with the 2 requests:

    - nightly (!) TvHeadend

    - update function for nightly

    [1]

    any idea how and where to paste/upload an ~8 MB kodi-crash-log ???

    edit:

    found a way: attached as zip (tvheadend-service.log, kodi-crash.log)

  • So did it get any better with LibreELEC nightly builds? In a couple of months Kodi 19 should be ready so I am asking the alpha and beta testers if it's still stuttering on Intel NUCs w/ 25Hz content.

    Still an issue with 10b1.

  • I'm using LE 9.2.6 on a J5005 NUC. 24fps content works perfectly, but as others have said 25fps is a mess, regardless of source. Interestingly, it seems to mostly be affected by the upscale algorithm: replacing Lanczos (which is my usual go-to) with Bicubic fixes it (barring a handful of stutters per hour). I don't have any 1080p video to test this on, since all of my 25fps content is composed of either DVD encodes or European TV shows, and I always "acquire" the latter at 720p to save space, but I suspect that if there was no scaling involved the video would not stutter.

    I'll try the fix suggested by bossanova808 asap and see if it fixes it for me as well. If I understand what it's doing, it forces the GPU to run at full throttle during playback, whose main drawback would be higher energy consumption, is that correct?

    Edit: I can confirm that doing echo 800 > /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card0/gt_min_freq_mhz via SSH worked for me. Doing cat /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:00:02.0/drm/card0/gt_cur_freq_mhz immediately afterwards gives 800, however playing a video and closing it brings it back to 100 while in menus, and back to 800 when playing a video. So as a temporary solution it works well enough for me.