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Full Version: SD movies stutter, HD movies play fine
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HW is Pi2.
Running latest version of Xbian (14.2 i believe) with all the updates.
Movie library is on another Pi2 connected via Samba and Ethernet cable.

My problem is as title says. I can play Blueray movies no problem. Yet whenever I try to play 480p movies it stutters like mad. And it's not just the video. Whole UI becomes sluggish.

Tried to downgrade to 14.1.(sudo apt-get install xbian-package-xbmc=14.1-1423177674
) Same results. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe I used to play SD movies without issue a few weeks ago. I did an update 3-4 days ago and there were tons of stuff on the list. I think one of them is messed up.

Only other thing that comes to mind is, maybe I need licences for the codecs in the settings?

Ayone else having such a problem?

<Edit 1> I think I got the problem. All the movies that stutter has AC3 audio codec. Ones with AAC doesn't stutter. Did we get an update to AC3 codec recently?
<Edit 2> MP3 audio encoded videos also stutters, Dolby files don't.
<Edit 3> Did a snapshot restore to a month ago. Didn't help. Updating all again. Also deleted advancedsettings file. I used to have caching related stuff in it. Also didn't help.
<Edit 4> Enabled debugging. FPS counter shows solid 24 fps yet what I'm getting at is definitely not 24fps. CPUs don't go above 20% While looking at the log files I noticed some weird stuff going on with FFmpeg. Someone more knowledgable could make something out of it hopefully... Debug file is attached.

<Edit 5> Fixed! Reverted all playback options and video options to default and increased buffer size. Now it's working as it should. I wonder what caused it. I'll keep messing with it. Tongue

<Edit 6> Found the culpit. It's my fckin logitech wireless headphones again... I switched to xbian just so that I could use these things, now they are giving me headache here too... Here is the deal: when I output audio tru HDMI I get butter smooth playback. When I route it thru my wireless headphones, I get stutter. I tried passthrough, didn't work. I know that I didn't have such a problem a week ago. So one of the recent updates caused this. I'll keep looking at it.

It's really weird tho, I feel like I'm the only one who uses his pi media station with wireless headphones.
OK. Here is the final situation.

-If I go with default settings for all and use TV's hdmi, all is well.

-If I disable MMAL hardware accel. movie runs smooth with headphones or HDMI. But then I can't watch HD movies(software decoder isn't beefy enough I guess...)

-If I try to watch an SD video with default settings + Headphones as audio output, I get flashing subtitles and choppy video.

Possible Solution: I need an addon that can disable HW acceleration for SD movies and enable them for HD.
Gave up. Switched to OpenElec. The latest beta doesn't seem to have the stable one's cracking sound problem with Logitech headphones.
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