Kodi 17.0 video stutter in live tv on Android

Ramon Zambelli

Hello,

with kodi 17 live tv stutter because HW acceleration is no used on some devices (tested with amlogic based STB). Kodi team acknowledged this problem and filled a bug:

http://trac.kodi.tv/ticket/17069

"Short term, less intrusive: The ffmpeg based hw accelerators have a decoder context that tracks the decoder instances. They need this because ffmpeg opens new decoders midstream or on seeks. If a decoder like DXVA on old AMD does not support multiple instances, the kodi instance of the decoder closes the connection to the hw resources, that the new instance can open it. The old instance will be still around until last decoded frame got rendererd or discarded."

Should this be fixed on tvheadend addon or on Kodi itself?

Robert Cameron

This is a Kodi issue. Their libraries do not support the full range of Amlogic's VPUs, which makes sense because they only infrequently make the sources available.

Another possibility that could be causing your problems are related to interlacing: deinterlacing can be quite intensive, especially if your hardware VPU is not well supported. It could also be related to bandwidth: full HD encoded in MPEG2 can be quite a beast to stream over 2.4GHz, especially if your area is already saturated in that spectrum.

Ramon Zambelli

Thanks for the prompt reply. I don't think is a interlace problem, but simply the hardware accelerated codec is not activated. Pressing 'o' key during playback shows FF* codec used in place of HW accelerated AML*.

Thomas K

I don't think this is only a kodi issue, because when you record the live feed and play it as recording, the stutter is gone.

Live tv uses Software Codec. The recording uses magically Amlogic Codec.

Tested on Odroid C2 with latest Android 5 image.

Im loving to have Kodi 17 on Android. All is working but Live TV not.