Dropped Frames every 100 seconds (1 Viewer)

[Jago]

Hi,

I've been using StreamedMP with Mediaportal fo a while now.

Recently, I noticed dropped frames. I don't know if they have been there before or if this started after installing the latest update to Mediaportal 1.40.

However, I found out that they occur every 100 seconds - and it doesn't matter what kind of video I am watching or if it is even a TV series. If I watch a movie in moving pictures I get the same.

I ran some tests and I found out that without StreamedMP (uninstalled it) everything was running fine.

But after I installed MP-TV-Series 3.5.0.2028 the problem was back again.

Is there some kind of background check going on every 100 seconds? It's really annoying.
Thank you for your help.

Cheers,
Jago

P.S.
I am running Mediaportal on an AMD E350 with Windows 7 64bit

 

[RoChess]

That E350 is seriously underpowered on the CPU side.

The .NET framework is simply too stressful then to do other tasks. So check MP-TVSeries settings on importing while fullscreen video is in effect, do the same for Moving-Pictures or any other plugins you might have. A simple update check on the weather info might cause the E350 to already overload when fullscreen video is being played on the GPU.

 

[Jago]

Importing while fullscreen video is off.

As I said, I have no CPU peaks. CPU load is low (around 20-30%).
Enabled MP-TVseries -> dropped frames.
Disabled-> runs smooth

But now after some more tests:
Enabled MP-TVseries again (after having disabled it before) - > video runs smooth??????

I don't understand this...

 

[RoChess]

Could have been a .NET framework optimisation check, or maybe the weather provider had issues and caused additional retries that caused that short blip on the CPU to upset things. Unless you run a resource utilization monitor constantly in the background that keeps tracks of a max, it can be hard to pin down a source.

Your log files do reveal some underlying issues.

[2013-07-29 19:31:53,566] [Log	] [MPMain ] [INFO ] - ERROR: unknown control:<togglebutton>
[2013-07-29 19:31:53,566] [Error ] [MPMain ] [ERROR] - Unable to load control. exception:confused:ystem.NullReferenceException: Der Objektverweis wurde nicht auf eine Objektinstanz festgelegt.
bei MediaPortal.GUI.Library.GUIWindow.LoadControl(XmlNode node, IDictionary`2 defines)

So you are missing proper skin files that cause dangerous NullExceptions. Not much indication as to what skin file uses them, but you should be able to scan your XML files on that.

And you are using the LAV splitter, but not the LAV audio/video codecs, any reasons for that? Be sure to adjust the codecs if you had negative experience with them, such as for example enable "DXVA2 (native)" for LAV video codec, as it would otherwise not work at all on your system.

 

[Jago]

Hi RoChess,

there is no weather plugin enabled (or at least I thought I deactivated everything...).

The LAV splitter was the default splitter. I had good performance with other codecs and I didn't want to change a running system. I will give LAV codecs a try now. Maybe they will work better.

To be honest I don't know anything about skin files. I have only the default skins from the MP installation and the one from StreamedMP which I usually use. What do I have to look for in the files?

Thanks.

 

[RoChess]

I can't remember now if they added 'togglebutton' in MePo v1.4 or removed it, either way your skin is reversed. So if you are on v1.4 and it does not use 'togglebutton' then your skin files apperantly have it. Or you have a v1.4 skin, but are not running v1.4 of MediaPortal. They really messed up with just dropping an important control element, as now you got this whacked up situations with skin files that support both.

 

[Jago]

Well, but could this togglebutton mess up explain the 100sec dropped frame?
I tried different codecs (including LAV) know - no difference.

Using the default skin didn't help either. The only thing that helped every time was disabling the MP-TVSeries Plugin....which is a plugin I really realy don't want to disable...

 

[kiwijunglist]

just guessing but maybe your TV series database has some mild corruption, not enough to make it fail but enough to give it issues . you could try back up database and create a new one . see if that helps. also e350 is really slow cpu and the video is also seriously underpowered, would be very easy for either component to get overwhelmed by the slightest hickup or background process. mp uses more resources than a lot of other media centre software so needs faster hardware.

 

[Jago]

Sorry, but I respectfully disagree - E350 is not underpowered.
I have no problems at all with playing 1080p smoothly if I use Arcsoft TotalMediaTheatre or MediaPlayerClassic.

What I don't understand is, what is going on in the background when Mediaportal is playing videos. Why is anything going on there in the first place?

 

[kiwijunglist]

mpchc is a video player mepo is a media center. mp uses more resources than mpchc. i can't answer your 2nd question. do you get this problem on your faster pc?