Hyperion NG - Video lag/stuttering when DispmanX enabled (Pi 2)

Hello!

Long time Hyperion user here. I did that silly thing of upgrading when there was nothing wrong. I upgraded to Hyperion NG (version 9 alpha) a few months ago and when playing back some videos, the HDMI connection would be lost and then reconnect occasionally until I stopped the Hyperion NG service. There didn't seem to be a pattern of which videos. I just upgraded to version 10 alpha (fresh install) and this now appears to be fixed (was there a bug here?), but I have noticed that when watching videos with the DispmanX grabber enabled, the video stutters slightly, like frames are being dropped. I disabled smoothing, but the problem remained. I also increased the capture frequency, but this made no difference. Only disabling the frame grabber resolved the issue.

Any pointers, or should I revert to using the original Hyperion project again?

This is a Raspberry Pi 2 with OSMC and Kodi v 18.x

Cheers,

Jamie

Thanks Lord-Grey for the quick response. Is there a particular value you'd recommend? It's currently 8.

Curiously this didn't seem to be an issue with the previous generation of Hyperion, so perhaps these values are different in NG?

Top shows the Hyperion service running at about 5% CPU

On the previous version I used defaults except for the LED config.

grabber-v4l2 has a width and height of -1 and sizeDecimation 8. Are those the values I need to look at? framegrabber has a width and height of 64 and a 10Hz frequency.

Tried with a picture decimation setting of 30 and this makes no difference to the frame loss

Logs here:

https://pastebin.com/raw/Vmu2p9mb

Would really appreciate some advice because I can't watch anything with v10 installed because the lip sync gets worse and worse until I disable the capture.

Not sure if relevant but only Framebuffer and DispmanX are shown in the drop down. The save button is unavailable if I choose Framebuffer.

I reverted to alpha 9 and the stuttering went away. I experienced the HDMI disconnection issues as I did before on that version, but I cured that by setting the framegrabber width and height from 80x45 to 64x64.

I'm not sure where the issue is with alpha 10 but it seems the changes in this area have negatively affected performance.

Another observation on alpha 10 is that on alpha 9 when I cleared the lights (I use an iOS app called Hyperion), they faded off and now they just cut off abruptly.

Will providing the respective config JSON files suffice, as I'm on alpha 9 now (working fine) and don't have screenshots of that section in alpha 10.

Incidentally, I came up with 64x64 for the frame grabber on alpha 9 because of a couple of threads I found like this one where it says it has to be a power of 2 and the same width/height to work: https://discourse.osmc.tv/t/video-breaks…-running/9577/7

Not sure if it's possible or necessary to achieve the same on alpha 10, although I didn't get the same HDMI disconnections with alpha 10.

I tried decimation at 30 and a few other values, but I honestly cannot remember which combinations of frequency. I can try 10Hz and 20 decimation. Is that right? I'm confused about how that relates to the working value of 64x64.

Thanks for your help!

Tried frequency of 10 and decimation values of 20 and 30 but juddery video/dropped frames persisted. This with 1080p content. Video lags away from audio drastically until the grabber is turned off.

Should I open a GitHub issue or do you have everything you need here?

Testing this on alpha 11

Unfortunately alpha 11 still causes video lag when the grabber is enabled. I tried decimation values between 20-30 and less frequent capture rates but this did not fix it. It does seem better than the last build, but alpha 9 with width 64, height 64 and frequency of 10 works perfectly.

Is there any way I can force a width and height of 64, regardless of source dimension? I.e.

https://discourse.osmc.tv/t/video-breaks…-running/9577/8

EDIT: Manually changed the export JSON file, setting width and height to 64 and pixelDecimation to 8 and reimported. No more stuttering issues. Not sure why or how this could be done in the Web UI but at least I can run the latest version without issue.

Lord-Grey

I ran in to this issue again today after updating Hyperion and realised that the width and height values in the export were set to 1920x1080. I manually changed the export file to width 64 and height 64, reimported and fixed the issue. Could this be available to edit in the web UI?