"Microstuttering" when playing back 1080 videos [solved]

Darksoul71 · 2014-04-11 10:00:46

Hi all,

the topic pretty much states it all. I am experiencing some sort of "microstuttering" when playing back 1080i or 1080p stuff from my external HDD which is formated in NTFS.
The effect is hard to describe. It is like someone is stopping the movie every few fragments of a second. Audio does stay in sync though.

I am using SMPlayer with VDPAU acceleration and a NVidia 9500GT (as you can tell from my signature). 720p works perfectly from the HDD but 1080i/p stuff stutters. This effect seems to be related to the filesystem as I experience a smilar effect with another external USB HDD connected to my system.

Playing back 1080x stuff straight from an external or internal HDD with EXT3 filesystem works like a charm. Top does not reveal any high load on my system when playing back 1080x videos from my NTFS drivers but the stuttering exists only there.

The issue is also not related to arch alone since I also run Xubuntu 12.04 with the close-source NVidia driver (in another version I guess) and the same effect is visible.

What am I experiencing here ?

Copying files over to my internal HDD is some workaround but I would prefer to keep my movies on the external disk for ease of use.

TIA,
D$

Last edited by Darksoul71 (2014-04-11 20:36:17)

karol · 2014-04-11 10:06:29

Can you get SMPlayer to preload more data? Have you tried increasing the cache?

Darksoul71 · 2014-04-11 10:08:39

Hm, honestly I never messed around much with the configuration of SMPlayer beside enabling VDPAU support but I will try.
Thanks for the hint. Possibly a bigger read-ahead cache will solve the stuttering. Although I am still curious what causes this.

OK, with 2x1.6GHz my E350 is not really a powerhouse but is not really seeing any big load here.

Edit: OK, I guess I can simply use mplayer from the terminal adjusting the cache as described here:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/streaming.html

Will try this evening and report back !

Last edited by Darksoul71 (2014-04-11 10:27:14)

Darksoul71 · 2014-04-11 20:38:23

Great....your suggestion solved it. Thanks karol !
Strangely enough SMPlayer had no cache preconfigured for local drivers but for every other device / option there were at least 1-2 MB.

Arch Linux

#1 2014-04-11 10:00:46

"Microstuttering" when playing back 1080 videos [solved]

#2 2014-04-11 10:06:29

Re: "Microstuttering" when playing back 1080 videos [solved]

#3 2014-04-11 10:08:39

Re: "Microstuttering" when playing back 1080 videos [solved]

#4 2014-04-11 20:38:23

Re: "Microstuttering" when playing back 1080 videos [solved]

Board footer