Severe stutters (frame skips) in movies via LAN (NFS), USB working fine

Kodi
1

Hello Guys.

I hope this is the right area, I thought it was the best fit for my problem.

My box: Mini M8S II, S905X, 2GB/16GB
CoreELEC 9.2.2

So… I rarely watch movies anymore, mostly series, but it still happens and never was any issue before.
However, something happened, must have changed in CE or I don’t know what it is…

Almost every single movie severely stutters for me now.
1080p, 2160p, low bitrate, high bitrate - it does not seem to matter (all x265 btw).

OK, first I thought it might be a bitrate thing and my network was the bottleneck…
So I restarted the NAS, the router and the box of course - no change.
Then I tested a 2160p episode of “Planet Earth II”, extremely high bitrate - no stutters whatsoever!
Alright, I tested a few movies again, all lower bitrate than the PE2 episode - they all stutter and skip frames.
Am I going mad? I never had those kinds of issues in the past!

So then I removed a USB HDD from the NAS and connected it to the box directly and what do you know? The movie plays absolutely fine!

I then updated back to CoreELEC 9.2.1… no change, all the movies still stutter via LAN.
I could try going back further, because I know it all worked fine once… but that does not sound like a good fix to me.

I am out of ideas now and I hope you can help me.
Bitrate does not seem to be an issue, 50mbit/s+ PE2 episode played fine.
All the movies had lower bitrates and still stuttered.

However, all the movies are longer in total playtime, that is the only major difference I can make out.
Could it be a buffer thing?
Encoding is also fine of course - playing via USB went perfectly smooth and I know my encodes. No shitty stuff there.

Please help me!
I appreciate it! :slight_smile:

2

Well… I guess everyone’s silence confirms how weird my problem is. :crazy_face:

I flashed back all the way to 9.0.3, which did not solve anything.

After that, I created a fresh 9.2.2 install on a different µSD and of course - no more stutters!
This finally confirms all the hardware is fine.

I had been dragging along the old installation for quite some time and it survived many updates…
But I guess that it messed itself up at some point.

Still, it would have been nice to learn what caused this.
There must be some kind of logical explanation.

The only alteration to the standard setup I can think of is that I still had…
echo ‘444,10bit’ > /sys/class/amhdmitx/amhdmitx0/attr
…in the autostart.sh.
Could that be a reason?

3

I don’t think so. I have the same box and it is working fine with all the versions.

4

So you also have that line in your autostart?

5

444,10bit is the default settings so I don’t have it in the autostart.

6

You can’t do 4K@50/60Hz at 444 10bit over HDMI 2.0.
Also, use the latest stable version, and remove this echo from autostart.sh, it’s not required.