"Surging" in video playback...

Seems like this started to be consistent with any movie within the last couple of weeks. Nothing unusual is showing up in the Serviio logs. Seems to be "less" or "nonexistent" with Blue-Ray grade files, than with DVD grade files. The Serviio server is dedicated to this, Windows updates have been performed, and nothing much is showing up in Task Manager. "Surge" is about 3/4 of a second to repeat, sound is unaffected. Overall network traffic is light, since only major user at this time is the TV setup.

Quad Core Ryzen, 8 Gb RAM.

What should I look for, or has Windoze just moved up compatibility requirements forcing a hardware upgrade?

Any suggestions welcome.

[atc98092]

Seems like this started to be consistent with any movie within the last couple of weeks. Nothing unusual is showing up in the Serviio logs. Seems to be "less" or "nonexistent" with Blue-Ray grade files, than with DVD grade files. The Serviio server is dedicated to this, Windows updates have been performed, and nothing much is showing up in Task Manager. "Surge" is about 3/4 of a second to repeat, sound is unaffected. Overall network traffic is light, since only major user at this time is the TV setup.

Quad Core Ryzen, 8 Gb RAM.

What should I look for, or has Windoze just moved up compatibility requirements forcing a hardware upgrade?

Any suggestions welcome.

I'm not following what you mean by surging. Are you talking about buffering, with the playback pausing then continuing? Or does the video "freeze" with the audio continuing?

I'm not following what you mean by surging. Are you talking about buffering, with the playback pausing then continuing? Or does the video "freeze" with the audio continuing?

It is about like watching someone swing, in some sense. The video is continuous, but is a non-uniform rate, as if the video is slow for 0.5 seconds, then speeds up slightly for 0.25 seconds. I don't see this happen on broadcast TV (so it isn't my attention span). Does not correlate with when I installed 2.0, but might with Windoze updates (one of the 1909 ones). And does not happen with 20-30 Mb video files, but does with smaller 2-8 Mb files. Probably worse 3-4 Mb movie-length files. So likely not buffering, per se.

Better description. Smooth, hic, hic, smooth hic, hic, ... about 3/4 second cycle The display just stops, rather than as I describe above. File is encoded MPEG-2, about 5 Mb (Bourne Identity), as my test example.

Also correlates to a firmware update I got on my Sony TV. So it may be an issue with their decompression scheme.

[atc98092]

Yeah, it might be something with the TV firmware update. I'm watching a DVD rip right now with Serviio 2.0. It has MPEG-2 video and AC3 audio. Using either a Roku Ultra or an Nvidia Shield as the player, no issues at all. I don't use the smart functions of any of my TVs, so I can't say if that would make any difference. But I've never seen a video play like you describe. The only playback issue I've ever seen is a slightly noticeable stutter with MPEG-2 playback using a Roku player with framerate matching enabled. But that's the Roku processing, and nothing with the Serviio stream.

Yeah, it might be something with the TV firmware update.

Problem disappears when I uncheck all options in Serviio, to handle anything to do with subtitles. So apparently Serviio, under Windoze, needs more resources / speed to do the job of unpacking the MKV files, and serving up subtitles and video streams.

Quadcore Ryzen 1300x (reports 3.5 GHz), and 16 Gb (I reported this as 8 Gb before... in error). Maybe I'll have to get hearing aids!

[atc98092]

I don't have that powerful of a system, but I also don't burn subtitles into the video. Yes, that causes full transcoding, which requires more resources. If captions are something that you would really like to have, you can either download SRT files from the Internet, and your TV might handle them, or use an external player that can handle the captions within your existing media. For me, that's using Kodi on an Nvidia Shield player. That's a bit expensive, but there are many generic Android players available online for under $50. And any of them can run Kodi.