Excessive frame drops (2 Viewers)

tclulow_4213

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I've just installed MediaPortal (1.12.0) on a HP G60 laptop (Vista) connected to a panasonic Viera TV.
Everything operates correctly but the live TV and recorded TV playback seems to be dropping lots of frames (sound is fine).
I've been through the quick and extended guides but the problem persists. The guides did fix the problem I was having using MAPR audio which was persistently silent before.
The problem is most noticable when the video pans (movement is jerky), during football (the ball moves in a series of steps) or the end credits of a program (they scroll in distinct steps rather than moving smootly.
Previously on this PC I used MCE and its rendering was fine.
 

mm1352000

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    Hello and welcome :)

    Thanks to the log files I can see that frames are indeed being dropped. However, currently I can't determine why. I suspect your low powered hardware (CPU and GPU) may have something to do with it, but I can't yet prove it.

    Please could you attach a screenshot of your LAV Video codec settings.

    Thanks,
    mm
     

    tclulow_4213

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    That's an impressively fast response, thanks.

    I hope this is what you're after:
    upload_2015-10-6_18-36-11.png
     

    mm1352000

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    That's an impressively fast response, thanks.
    Happy to help. :)

    The LAV video settings look okay to me, so I'm a bit puzzled. I suppose there's a possibility that real-time security software scanning is affecting the situation. However, the symptoms for that problem tend to be a bit different.

    What does the Windows task manager say about your CPU and HDD usage when viewing live or recorded TV? (Note: it may help you to know that you can press alt+enter to toggle between full-screen and windowed mode.)
    Does the problem only affect playback of TV content, or does it also affect playback of video content (eg. mp4, mkv, mpeg, DVDs etc.) too?
     

    CyberSimian

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    The problem is most noticable when the video pans (movement is jerky), during football (the ball moves in a series of steps) or the end credits of a program (they scroll in distinct steps rather than moving smoothly.
    May I add that I have also noticed this. It occurs on HD TV (both live and recorded), and on DVD playback. I have got the impression that this is not uncommon, but most people call it "stuttering" rather than "dropped frames".

    I did notice a similar effect with SD TV on WMC, but that was due to the refresh rate being set to 60Hz; setting refresh to 50Hz (the correct setting for Europe) fixed that problem (but I did not have HD TV when I was using WMC).

    I have not yet gone through the thread that deals with optimising video and audio playback, which is why I have not raised this as an issue.

    -- from CyberSimian in the UK
     

    Owlsroost

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    From the evr.log - this looks a bit odd:

    Code:
    [2015-10-05 16:28:34,301] [ abc26a8] [1090] - Raw est display cycle, linReg: 19.959943 ms, simple: 19.958300 ms, diff: 0.000082
    [2015-10-05 16:28:34,301] [ abc26a8] [1090] - Measured display cycle: 19.959943 ms, locked: 1
    [2015-10-05 16:28:34,301] [ abc26a8] [1090] - Measured scanline time: 17.741797 us
    [2015-10-05 16:28:34,301] [ abc26a8] [1090] - Display (from windows): 1920 x 1080 @ 60.000000 Hz | Measured refresh rate: 50.100345 Hz

    ...it's getting confused between 50Hz and 60Hz for the display - have you got two displays active i.e. the laptop screen and an external monitor/TV ? If so, are they both running at the same refresh rate ?
     

    Owlsroost

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    It looks like it's only an Intel 945/X3100/X4500 GPU (pretty weak), so it will probably struggle to drive two displays simultaneously and render the video content (with de-interlacing).
     

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