Can anyone point me in the right direction here? I have a pretty beefy PC I use as a server and HTPC. 24 2.5ghz cores, 64gb ram, kind of a crappy video card, debian 11. I just migrated all my stuff over and stress tested it supporting 8 different transcribed streams simultaneously (mix of in/out of local). That worked great.

BUT, the video playback is choppy (as in frame skipping) and out of sync when I’m running the HTPC program. Oddly using the web client on the same machine avoids that issue.

Any thoughts? I’m wondering if it might be that it’s an older TV it’s plugged into and there’s some issue there. Thing is, like I said, the webclient its worlds better. Webclient seems to have some issues but I’m pretty sure that’s just due to the TV.

Any pointers are helpful! I’m OK at this stuff but very much learning.

  • batmaniam@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Update: I adjusted the settings in the HTPC client to force a lower quality (the TV that’s hooked up to is only 720p anyway). Smooth as butter. I think it was definitely what you were saying and forcing a conversion was a good workaround.

    To anyone else who’s reading this and me see a related issue in the future: I also have an issue on this box where I can’t get my display to output at the actual resolution of the TV. The system insists on outputting 1080p, and when I manually adjust the display settings it goes black.

    It works fine for some reason though. I mention for future folks because I suspect (based on the above input) the HTPC client may be taking cues from the system setting, which is wrong.

    In any event, the HTPC might still think it’s outputting to a 1080p display but with the forced conversion it’s operating just fine. THANK YOU.

    edit: I wanted to add I had done this from the menu available while watching a video, and it didn’t work. I had to do it at the main settings with no playback going.

    • Faceman🇦🇺English
      4·
      1 year ago

      re. the resolution thing, there are settings in the app for setting the TV to match the resolution and or refresh rate of the video content, which is intended to give the best possible image, however an older TV or one with an unusual resolution (1366x768 for example was common on budget flatscreens for a while and scaled poorly) can have trouble with the auto switching settings.

      The other thing that is possible here is trying to direct play a 1080p video, even if hardware decoding is working is forcing the system to then downscale to 720p to drive the display, so the scaling can be a bottleneck unless it can be done in hardware, which might not be working, or is too much for the system to handle. that could be why forcing a transcode to 720p is more stable as it gets that step out of the way before it is even decoded. of course the best solution would be to not have to do it at all.

      you might be better with the scaling settings turned off so the app doesn’t try to change them from your system settings, but if you do that you can run into problems with 24p content not being paced properly on a 60hz TV for example, so play with them.