Eventual frame skipping during playback

[sdmaged99]

Frame skipping started, movie starts to stutter and becomes unwatchable. You have to stop the movie and then start it again

Exactly what is mentioned in the first post on this topic:-


"Since switching, I'm seeing a consistent issue when playing back movies that they develop jerky playback where the audio sounds fine but the video becomes jerky/laggy. I've found that if I pause the move and then resume, it'll be "fixed" for a while and then develop it again. Unfortunately I can rarely playback any movie end to end without this problem from happening so I've switched back to SPMC for now."

[VonMagnum]

Agree, it's particularly bad with 1080p material.

Kodi doesn't exhibit this problem on the same platform.

I believe many Nvidia Shield TV users have simply given up on MrMC.

I've been giving up on KODI on the Shield as well. It randomly "stops playing" on newer versions of KODI sometimes and on older versions, the screen "freezes" sometimes and then "catches up" with fast motion video or the like. There's something odd going on there. The movie stopping randomly can be maddening (I've had it do it as much as 4 times in one movie and as little as not at all. It usually averages 1-2 times). One user believes it has to do with the brand of router used for WiFi (supposedly doesn't happen for him using Ethernet, but that's not an option for some of us to easily run cable). The stopping thing only started after an NVidia Shield firmware update several months ago and from what I've read, it's known on the Nvidia forums as well, but no fixes thus far in that regard. They haven't even finished their SMB3 code after 1.5 years (still one-sided only with extremely slow transfers of files from a computer to the Shield over the Network for some reason; even SMB1 wasn't that slow). It doesn't support Atmos on much of any other apps on a 2K projector either (unlike Apple TV 4K which supports a lot of Atmos with 2K).

To be honest, I've been extremely disappointed in the Shield. For the #1 recommended Android box to use with KODI, it has been a joke for playback (while my old 2nd Gen FireTV 4K doesn't support proper passthrough for Atmos, it has ZERO playback issues with movies using KODI, at least (music still crashes it once in awhile and doesn't always play well over the network; I store it locally for that reason).

It's odd, though. MrMC doesn't stop playing or freeze like KODI on the Shield, but the odd 'stutter' happens instead. Given it doesn't happen every time here, I can't help but wonder if all three behaviors are somehow related, but the different code brings it out in different ways for some reason? Then again, maybe not.

[sdmaged99]

Well, check back here in 3 months....

[BillyBudapest]

It's odd, though. MrMC doesn't stop playing or freeze like KODI on the Shield, but the odd 'stutter' happens instead. Given it doesn't happen every time here, I can't help but wonder if all three behaviors are somehow related, but the different code brings it out in different ways for some reason? Then again, maybe not.

I also wondered about this. One thing MrMc does a lot better on my Nvidia Shield fed by my unraid NAS is *not* buffer like 'out of the box' Kodi does. Per this discussion though, Kodi does *not* skip frames/stutter on the same hardware, particularly with 1080p material as MrMc does.

Regarding buffering issues one difference is MrMc has (or had last time I looked) a max 'memory cache' (memorysize) of 200 MB which can (only) be set in the GUI. I believe any reference/edit to 'memorysize' (which used to be 'cachemembuffersize') in advancedsettings.xml will be ignored in MrMc. Overall having this setting in the GUI is a welcome improvement over Kodi since it puts it where it should rather than in some obscure file the user should never have to deal with.

As you mentioned everyone doesn't seem to have/report a 'buffering' problem with Kodi but of course many have/do and many an article/post has been written on the subject and of course there is official documentation on this at kodi.wiki. I found that changing the buffermode, memorysize and readfactor have improved things in terms of buffering in Kodi versus the 'out of the box' settings on my setup.

In MrMc I believe readfactor is ignored and/or has been removed.

[davilla]

Correct, readfactor is ignored and has been removed.

Adding greater than 200 MB opens the door for abuse and crashes. Which is why it's not there. The abuse is that user try to resolve network issues with increasing this cache which only delays the stop/start they are seeing.

Bottom line is that if your network cannot burst feed a 200MB cache, then any high rate hdr playback will be crap. You just can't make a 100Mb network play hdr, it's just not fast enough. You need 1Gb or 802.11ac.

[BillyBudapest]

Correct, readfactor is ignored and has been removed.

Adding greater than 200 MB opens the door for abuse and crashes. Which is why it's not there. The abuse is that user try to resolve network issues with increasing this cache which only delays the stop/start they are seeing.

Bottom line is that if your network cannot burst feed a 200MB cache, then any high rate hdr playback will be crap. You just can't make a 100Mb network play hdr, it's just not fast enough. You need 1Gb or 802.11ac.

Yep thanks, makes sense, and as noted buffering doesn't seem to be an issue for most people with MrMc.

Getting back to the original topic, does the 'beta with tweakings to the audio synchonization backported from Kodi' mentioned in https://forum.mrmc.tv/viewtopic.php?f=3 ... 7&start=10 attempt to address this or was that only for the DTS problem?

[Shkanick]

Is there any hope that you will fix the frame skipping problem when viewing local content?

[hieyemtim]

I’d love to hear from the developers that they are working on it too. Using Kodi for now but miss MRMC

[davilla]

koying pushed out a beta with some changes, did that have any effect ?

[sdmaged99]

Using latest version of mrMC as of today, and still the exact same issue. This is obviously a problem that's been introduced with one of the later versions of MrMC. I absolutely cannot use this product until this is fixed. I have to stop the movie and then play it in Plex instead otherwise the stuttering infuriates everyone


i've already posted the debug over three weeks ago and still had absolutely no feedback on it. Honestly, i don't think MrMC will ever reach the popularity that it could (and should) until support is improved tenfold.

Just to add, i highly doubt this is an issue with the Nvidia Shield, as MrMC is the ONLY product this issue happens on. Kodi is fine, as is Plex, as is VLC