Playback quality vs frames per second

[maxpayne]

Apologies if this has been posted/resolved before (I did a quick search of the forum and couldn’t pinpoint anything similar):

Have a WD TV Live, which after sorting out networking shares, etc now works great. However, I noticed some choppy playback - looks like frame dropping - on certain movies. After comparing a few that worked perfect with those that don’t I’ve come to the conclusion that any movies encoded at 25.000 frames / second experience choppiness, while the ones at the more traditional 23.976 fps run great (regardless of bit rate). Is this a known issue, and am I best off re-encoding the offending videos to the lower frame rate? Or am I just missing something…?

[mkelley]

Welcome to the forums.

How are you playing your shares?  If wireless, it’s most likely a bandwidth issue (look at the bitrates in a player like VLC – if they are greater than 25mbps that’s too much for most networks to stream properly).  You can verify this by copying one of the offending files to a USB stick and playing it locally – if it plays fine, it’s not the Live that’s at fault.

[maxpayne]

Thanks for the reply!

I’ve tried playing both off of a wireless connection and a USB one and found the same issue in both cases. It has also been pretty independent of bit rates - most of which are sub 1mbps (~700kbps etc). I’ve also noticed that 30.000 fps seem to run fine. 

I’m wondering if it may be an issue with the TV, so I’m going to try using different video outputs to see if that makes any difference.

***UPDATE***

So, I connected it up to the TV via composite and component connections and the jumpiness disappeared. I then switched it back to HDMI and noticed it had originally been set to the AUTO mode on the WD TV Live. Switching it to HDMI 1080/60p (supported by the TV I’m using) also removed the frame-dropping!

I guess the bottom line is to make sure everything is configured properly

As an aside - how does the AUTO setting decide what refresh rate to put out?

[TonyPh12345]

It decides based on the HDCP negotiation from the display and the media selected.   There have been other comments made in the IDEAS lab that the choice of refresh rate isn’t suitable for the frame rate of a lot of media types.