Hey everyone! I need some help with solving a strange issue I’ve encoutered in CoreELEC that I haven’t found anyone else talking about.
So here’s the thing: I’m running CoreELEC 21.1.1-Omega (stable) on an Ugoos AMB6+, and I’m using it to play 4K movies directly from my NAS. Most of it has worked very well so far and I’m pretty satisfied with what it can do. However, 2 days ago I found a strange behavior in one of the movies, where the movie was frozen in place for the last 10 seconds, while the audio and subtitles played like normal until the movie finished. After some more testing, I noticed it did this in other movies as well, but with different amount of seconds it was frozen in place. However, some other movies that I tested worked like normal and nothing happened.
The behaviour is incosistent between movies, but for the movies where it does freeze, it always freezes at a specific time, every single time. I decided tho to do some troubleshooting and figure out where the issue lies. And the conclusion I came to that it’s either something weird with CoreELEC or (but less likely) the AM6B+ device itself. The files I tried worked like normal in vlc on Windows, meaning that it’s not the video files or the NAS that are at fault. And it’s not the connection type either, as the same behaviour occurred when playing the same movies from an SSD through the USB3 port with a sata adapter. So something is off with either the device or the OS, but I don’t have a clue on what the fix would be. Any form of help or additional information about this would be really appreciated!
Hey, thank you for notifying me on that, I had completely missed setting the videos as available for everyone with the link. That’s been fixed now. I’ve also changed the debug log to a similar one where I did the same test, but now it’s viewable with a hastebin link.
I did some testing with the files and transcoded the Deadpool Wolverine remux in Handbrake (without Dolby Vision). That file played like normal in the ending. Out of curiosity, I tried disabling DV in settings, and the remux stopped freezing in the end… kind of. It still froze in the last 2 seconds of the movie, but not like 10 seconds early as it did before. Even changing the DV compatability mode from lossless to any of the other DV profiles made the remux behave like this as well. Still tho, it shouldn’t freeze at all (like the transcoded file), so I feel like there’s something more to it. I’ve also been digging through the log and may have found another clue to this whole problem. There’s a line in the log that pops up in the middle of the all the text about the video playback, which says something like “CVideoPlayerVideo - Stillframe detected, switching to forced 23.976024 fps”, followed up by “CPtsTracker: pattern lost on diff 208541.666666, number of losses 1”
It does match up time-wise with when the video freezes, and when looking through the log from the transcoded file, the same line only appears right after the last frame has been displayed, so I believe that line has something to do with this as well. Only question is what exactly triggers this stillframe code.
Sorry for delay. The latest nightly that I tried was the November 11th build, where the same problem popped up. I guess I could try the new latest build, and see if it’s any different. I’ll give an update when I’ve tried it.
I’m also experiencing this since I moved from CE-NE (all perfect except no DV FEL support) to CE-NG (DV FEL support but no more interlaced content nor VC-1 support, I don’t really care )
I didn’t notice on movies as I never wait until the final seconds of the end credits. But I noticed on most, but not all, demo files. I couldn’t find a pattern of behavior on the files content format (video and/or audio) so I don’t know what triggers that.
A lot, if not all, demo files have visual activity until the very end (TrueHD/DTS demos, DV demos, etc.) like splashing brand logos and stuff so it’s very noticeable when the video freezes a few seconds early with the sound still running.