50/60 fps video playback issues on RPi 3

1st Official Post

    I've had this intermittent issue with poor performance when watching 1080p50 or 1080p60 video (internet streaming e.g. YouTube) on my RPi 3, which seems to have got consistently worse since upgrading to 9.2.3 and seems to happen all the time now.

    The problem I see is a lot of dropped frames, or stuttering.

    Log sample:

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    If I try MMAL instead of OMXPlayer, I get no stuttering (audio plays fine) but a massive amount of dropped frames for prolonged periods. Either option is mostly unwatchable.

    Locally played videos seem fine, though I don't have any 50/60 fps content. 1080i50 from TV broadcasts play back fine (tvheadend live or recordings). I've not encountered any issues with 30 fps or lower framerates.

    I increased the memorysize to 52428800 in advancedsettings.xml as I was seeing some buffering issues in the logs previously, but this issue persists.

    The video being played during the log was only available in 1080p60 max. It happens with Twitch and other add-ons too. This problem is not related to trying to play videos with resolutions higher than 1080p.

    Same problem on RPi 2.

    Only tried using MMAL. Can confirm that the audio stream plays fine, but the video stream gets worse the longer it is played for. By this I mean that the first 10 seconds of playback appear normal, but then for every second of playback after more and more frames are dropped.

    e.g.

    Playback time (s)
    		 Dropped Frames
    		 Actual Framerate (fps)
    0 0 60
    5 10 50
    10 20 40
    20 40 20
    30 59 1
    60 239 0.25

    The above figures are by no means scientifically accurate, but definitely getting <1 fps after less than 1 minute of viewing. Pausing and resuming playback seems to reset the playback time listed above to 0, but it quickly degrades.

    Downgraded to 9.2.1 and everything working well again.

    Yes, I was experiencing similar with MMAL.

    I've also reverted back to 9.2.1 and high framerate videos play fine. I had more stability issues with 9.2.1 but an occasional crash is more manageable than unwatchable videos.

    Same problem here. RPi 3 and LibreELEC 9.2.3. 1080p60 videos are stuttering and crashing the youtube plugin. After downgrade to 9.2.1 everything runs smoothly again.

    Just registered here, to chime in.

    After the update to 9.2.3 on my raspberry 3 last week I did not check everything.

    Youtube 1080p was working as exspected, TVheadend with DVB-S in HD was working...

    Today I fired up Twitch.tv plugin again and 1080p wasn't usable at all. Dropped frames, while audio was working fine, bad stutter all over the place in 1080p30&60. Had to use 720p30/60.

    I reset the settings, reinstalled Libreelec, changed SD card, changed raspberry hardware... to no avail, 1080p in twitch was not usable.

    Last resort was this forum, thank you for your input@all. I formatted again, installed 9.2.1 and everything is fine again =)


    4 hours lost, but at leas it is working again =)

    Quote from Zyxx

    I reset the settings, reinstalled Libreelec, changed SD card, changed raspberry hardware... to no avail, 1080p in twitch was not usable.

    Last resort was this forum, thank you for your input@all. I formatted again, installed 9.2.1 and everything is fine again =)

    Oh no! I just downgraded through the updater UI, took like 10 minutes...

    The problem is consistent between add-ons, regardless of settings. These streaming services are my only source of high framerate video so the only situations where I experience the problem.

    As I said earlier, 1080i50 TV is fine for whatever reason.

    That is not correct at all, it de-interlaces it to 1080p50 depending on the de-interlacer setting. But there are a lot of different things going on when playing back such content, less video bandwidth for starters.