Intel and VC1 issues

Hi,

Not exactly sure when this issue started but I am having some issues with VC1 encoded BR rips (1:1 rips from own discs).

AVC encoded films are fine, however VC1 encoded films show serious pixelation on certain scenes. Usually on a scene change or an area of light to dark contrast. The artifacts are worse on lower bit rate films. For example I watched Contact last night and towards the end of the film, the bit with the actual machine flight, it was quite bad.

However something like The Dark Knight which I also watched recently was nowhere near as noticeable. Same films work fine in software from this point of view but they drop frames as it's a lower end NUC. So that's not a solution for me. . Anyone else experiencing this?

Hardware is Asus Beebox N3150.

ASRock > Beebox Series

Tried all the version 8 versions available, all the same. Not gone back to version 7, and tested yet. It's certainly something that has happened recently though (in the 3 or 4 months).

It's great the LibreElec team are continuing with the OpenElec name, but this bug is annoying the hell out of me.

Quote from Klojum

All bug reports start with a (debugging enabled) kodi.log file: HOW TO:Provide Logfile - LibreELEC

So far, LibreELEC is still in Alpha state, so expect breakage.
And yes, all bugs are annoying

Here you go:

eYPR

Well ...

This isn't fixed in the latest alpha either.

So I went all the way back to OELEC 6.03 and its still an issue there as well! Seems to be a long standing issue with the video card drivers then. Not LibreElec's fault as a team obviously, but this does need to be sorted. I cant be the only one using similar hardware? Seems a google search comes up with this:

VC-1 1080p24 Visual Artifacts in OpenELEC/Kodi with VAAPI acceleration

Looks like I will be going back to my AMD box instead, and people always say that intel are the best boxes for Kodi, seems not.

Quote from lrusak

There are two things we can try

Disable vaapi (not a great solution but maybe vaapi is the issue)

Change to the modesetting driver instead of the Intel one. I will have to wait till I'm home as writing udev rules on a phone is difficult.

VAAPI is definitely the issue, unfortunately Celerons just aren't powerful enough to do full BR rips it seems in software. (Not this one anyway)

Any help is much appreciated. Even if I end up going back to my AMD E350 box I will still be using LibreElec, so its win/win.

Quote from lrusak

For the modesetting driver you will have to ssh and and issue the following command

Code

wget -O /storage/.config/udev.rules.d/97-xorg.rules http://sprunge.us/dRfG

Then reboot

If it doesn't work out or it's worse then just remove the file and reboot

Code

rm /storage/.config/udev.rules.d/97-xorg.rules

Hi,

Sadly that didn't make any difference, thanks for trying though. I suspect this is a long standing bug which wont get fixed any time soon. Just cant believe nobody else has spotted it until now.

Oh well back to AMD it is ...

Thanks again

Hi,

Sorry for necroing an old thread, just wanted to say that I believe this issue is now fixed.

I tried 8.2.3 (which still had the issue), then tried updating to the current Milhouse nightly (18th I think) and that appears to fix the issue.

No idea what the cause was, it was also an issue in windows as well as LE though so probably not a driver problem.

Might have an ffmpeg fix maybe? I still need to do more thorough tests of the alpha build to see if there are any other issues. But If its stable enough then it looks like I should be able to go back to using the beebox for LE.

Quote from milhouse

LibreELEC Pixelization

Thanks for the explanation Milhouse, nice to know I wasn't going mad and thinking there was an issue with my device.