Emby Theatre - stutter 4K playback

[somy 25]

Hi:

I have an old laptop with Skylake i7 cpu (Intel 530 graphics) and Nvidia 940m dedicated graphics.

I experience very bad 4K hevc playback experience. So what’s I have tried:

1) use hd530 for hw accelerated - it play for a couple of seconds then jumps force and back and sometime image are by green mask, completely mint usable

2) with 940m it works better - however for whatever reason it plays fine for some minutes, then suddenly because super stutter, and usually seek back or forward for some second helps, it becomes smooth again but after some minutes it’s stutter again. 
Any suggestion?

[brothom 177]

@somyit sounds like your server can't keep up with transcoding, maybe your hardware isn't fast enough or the desired codec is very intense.

When the client requests a piece of the video (for example at 00:10) emby transcodes a piece of it (for example 00:10 + 5 seconds). By the time your client reaches the 00:10 mark, the server sent the transcoded piece yet, causing stuttering / lag. This also applies to seeking in media that's being transcoded.

What I personally prefer to do, is create different types of media for different devices.

h264 with aac stereo for low-end devices (chromecast, etc) and original/4K for high-end devices. Basically any old device supports those and the UHD tvs usually support a whole bunch too.

I also re-encode files when they contains DTS audio since none of my hardware supports it.

 

 

[Neminem 1518]

Also avoid picture subtitles such as  these they will hurt you old CPU when they need to be burned in.

• VobSub (idx/sub)
• PGS (Presentation Graphic Stream Subtitle)
• SUP (Subtitle bitmap image of DVD and Blu-ray)

[brothom 177]

@somywhat @Neminemis also a common resource hog and a very good point!

If you have/like subtitles, try to always extract them into simpler formats like .srt.

Edited January 17 by brothom

[somy 25]

4 hours ago, brothom said:

@somyit sounds like your server can't keep up with transcoding, maybe your hardware isn't fast enough or the desired codec is very intense.

When the client requests a piece of the video (for example at 00:10) emby transcodes a piece of it (for example 00:10 + 5 seconds). By the time your client reaches the 00:10 mark, the server sent the transcoded piece yet, causing stuttering / lag. This also applies to seeking in media that's being transcoded.

What I personally prefer to do, is create different types of media for different devices.

h264 with aac stereo for low-end devices (chromecast, etc) and original/4K for high-end devices. Basically any old device supports those and the UHD tvs usually support a whole bunch too.

I also re-encode files when they contains DTS audio since none of my hardware supports it.

 

 

Thanks - I'm in LAN with direct playback, so it's maybe because my old laptop cannot handle 4K stream.

Strangely I read skylake can decode 4k HEVC, not sure why super stutter. Have also tried Potplayer and Kodi same result with iGPU.

The nvidia GPU seems to burn a lot of cpu time, so neither seem to work reliably. 

[Luke 42077]

@somy

 

Hi there, let's look at an example. Please attach the information requested in how to report a media playback issue. Thanks!

 

[pwhodges 2012]

13 hours ago, somy said:

Strangely I read skylake can decode 4k HEVC, not sure why super stutter.

It's not just the format, but the bit rate that you have to be concerned with.

Paul

[brothom 177]

18 hours ago, somy said:

Thanks - I'm in LAN with direct playback, so it's maybe because my old laptop cannot handle 4K stream.

Considering it's in Direct Play, no transcoding is taking place. If the file lags, try playing the file on another (newer) device to see if there isn't something going on with the file itself.

If the other device can play the file just fine, it's probably the old laptop struggling due to either the bitrate or frames as @pwhodgesnoted.