Raspi 4B 4G stuttering + tearing

1st Official Post

    After I read the announcement for 9.2.0

    Quote
    In this initial release 1080p playback behaviour and performance on the 4B are broadly on-par with the previous 3B/3B+ model, except for HEVC media which is now hardware decoded and massively improved

    I replaced my Raspi 2 with a new 4B. But it is unusable. The video is stuttering and I see tearing effects. I play 1080p24 Movies (h264) with 24Hz and the TV switches correctly to this mode.

    Here is a debug log:

    http://ix.io/24y6

    The guys at OSMC seem to be less euphoric:

    Quote

    As the device is new and MMAL is being deprecated from Kodi, we need to support V4L2/GBM. This is still a work in progress by Raspberry Pi

    In the interim we will support software decoding. It will be a long time (at least a year) before hardware video acceleration is working well using this stack.

    (This was end of October 2019.)

    So what is the current status of Raspi 4 support? Should it play 1080p h264 as good as the Raspi 2? If so, why do I experience these problem?

    I don't have LE running on my Pi4/4 right now (I did), but my understanding is that h264 decoding is NOT supported in hardware on the Pi4 (vs h265). So it would be like viewing an HD h265 video on a 3b+. My testing suggestion would be to re-encode the h264 video into h265 (via handbrake, whatever) and see how that runs in comparison?

    • Official Post

    RPi4 supports H264 in hardware to 1080p (same capability as the RPi3) and above that will be software decoded though this is way beyond the CPU capabilities of the hardware. H265 is supported in hardware to 4K (new capability for RPi4). Some people see the lack of 4K support for H264 on the RPi4 as an issue, but as no broadcast formats use that combination (only test files and deliberately encoded media) it's not a real-world problem.

    Most of the whiny threads about RPi4 video issues in the LE forum are caused by people not understanding how to use the whitelist and/or forcing deinterlaced media (which needs 50/59.94 modes) to run at 25/29.97 refresh rates, often at 4K resolution, which is never going to be good. I've never been a big Pi user as I always had other toys around, but I've been using RPi4 as the daily driver for a while now and I don't see any major issues. I don't care about 3D support and other niche things RPi3 excells at though. Firmware updates continue to address minor nits in RPi4 behaviour (e.g. heat) but software support has generally come a long way in the 6-months since launch. HDR and higher-bitrate audio support are still missing but they don't exist on older hardware either and neither are simple additions. There are other higher-priority items for the RPi Foundation to work but they are being worked on in the background.