A few seconds into playback of a TV episode, CE shows a blank screen for a couple of seconds. There is also a few seconds of blank screen when Stop is pressed.
I’m using CE 21.2 on Minix Neo XJ22 and an LG OED TV.
The initial blank screen occurs on several TV episodes, but not on films.
The blank screen on Stop occurs much more often.
The same file plays back with no interruption on Kodi on an Android Tablet and VLC on a Windows PC. The library list also returns immediately after presing Stop with no blank delays.
I did check the settings at Recommended Kodi Settings, well those that still existed, if that’s what you meant. They were either at the default or else I tried whitelisting (which I’d never heard of before) the HD resolutions with no difference.
If those aren’t relevant to ‘frame rate switching’ then no.
Try with “Adjust display refresh rate => Disabled” to see if any difference. If then the “blank screen” does not occur, then it’s your TV’s slow frame-rate switching responsible for it.
Setting ‘Adjust display refresh rate’ to Off did the trick for both the in-video playback blank and the post-playback stopped blank screens. Tx!
I’ve realised that this setting has also fixed my Odroid N2+!
What is the side-effect of disabling this setting i.e. diverting from the recommended settings?
It’d be great if Kodi had a video/audio tune-up wizard that would go through all these obscure and esoteric (well to me) settings to make sure it was working from the off rather than stumbling into them as you went.
Normally recommended settings work best in most cases. In your situation, your TV is very slow in changing refresh-rate, so you have a wait interval when the change takes place.
In your situation, for best resulting video reproduction, I’d leave “Adjust display refresh rate => On start / stop” and get used to delay caused by your display.
Try in Settings/System/Display to set “Delay after change of refresh rate => Off”, to minimize this delay.
Todays modern TVs usually switch display-rate in a few hundreds of a second, so this delay is not seen…
However this blank screen symptom affects all of the following displays - LG OLED TV (2024 model), Sony HD projector and a Lenovo 4k monitor.
Notwithstanding that they are pretty modern models (saver perhaps for the Sony) and not too shabby in performance either, they also do not exhibit these blank screens when using Kodi on Windows PC. It’s only when using CE that the blank screens occur.
The only explanation that I can think of is that only CE properly sends command to adjust/switch refresh rate.
It is strange though, because LG Oled TVs usually switch refresh very fast…
I’ve just double checked my Windows & Android Kodi settings and the Adjust display refresh rate settings are both Off. I know I never changed it as I’ve no idea what the setting does.
So is there anything to describe the refresh rate switching function i.e. when is it used and why? And to ask my question again, what is the effect of disabling this setting ?
Tx for the info. This is interesting as I’d never heard of DRR other than that graphics adapters & monitors supported a certain max refresh rate and high values were desirable for gamers. I don’t recall it as a setting on DVD/BR players.
I did search for info but that which I found was scattered in multiple areas, and even then much of it does not describe the user experiences. Apparently the main symptom of the ‘wrong’ refresh rate is juddering playback or “looks horrible”, but I certainly wouldn’t be able to spot it for sure. Plus I’ve hardly ever seen that symptom on Kodi/Windows, Kodi/Android or VLC etc. i.e. platforms that don’t support it. And if I did see any judder I’d put it down to a problematic encode or CPU/network problems.
However all I did know was that the frequent mysterious blank screen pauses interrupting media operation made CE/Kodi look clunky and not a frictionless UI. I presume there is no pop-up warning possible advising of a frame rate change i.e. the reason for the blank screen?
Now I know of its existence, is there an easy way to show if there is a disparity when media is playing via Info? I see there is Player Process Info but that seems only easily accessible if you have a keyboard and my Kodi boxes don’t have one. The other methods of invocation looked difficult (I’m sure it’s easy if you’ve done it already) . If it’s a CE USP then maybe it could benefit from some more (ahem) visibility?
But I’m a bit puzzled if its a CE/LE-only feature then why is it Kodi option?
I played the above problematic video on Kodi/Windows and pressed O - after a few seconds the FPS went from 23.810fps o to 23.976fps, not a huge jump but it still blanked the screen for a few secs. if I set DRR to off, then frankly I could not see a difference in media playback, save for the ‘smoother’ experience of no blank screens. But then again I don’t really know what I’m potentially missing!
As before it’d be great if there was a performance tuning wizard that could prompt to change settings based on how various content played using various content types e.g. https://kodi.wiki/view/Samples.
you ever heard about frame rate switching?