Microstuttering when playing back blu-rays and MKV files

[Dave3000]

Whenever I play an MKV file through Kodi or MPC-HC I sometimes get a quick microstutter and when I rewind and replay that part the microstutter does not happen again. It happens on every MKV file I played. I have that same microstuttering problem when playing a blu-ray disc through PowerDVD 13 Ultra as well. These microstutters happen about 3-4 times during a movie. I also had a microstutter problem one time when playing a blu-ray disc on my PS4 but I don't think it's the disc because I rewinded at replayed that part where stuttered and it did not happen again. However, this microstuttering happens more often when playing video on my PC. Even Youtube microstuttered on my once on my PC. It can't be my TV as I had the same problem when using my monitor. I can't be my hard drive as I recently purchased a new hard drive and it the microstuttering still happened. It also happens under Openelec. I also get microstuttering in software mode in Kodi. My new hard drive for media storage is a WD Green 6 TB which is connected on to the X-Dock of my case which is connected to the Marvel SATA controller on my motherboard. My old hard drive for media storage is a WD Passport 2 TB.

System specs:

i7-4930k 3.4 GHz
32 GB RAM
GTX 780 Ti
512 GB SSD

 

[Noctifer616]

You can put the file on an USB drive and play it on that to make sure the issue is really not the HDD.

What codec do you use? Have you tried to change it?

 

[Deders]

What motherboard and Graphics card are you using? Also does this happen in VLC?

I've had this issue with a particular brand of motherboard, also want to find out if the GPU is doing any hardware decoding or if it's all done by the CPU.

Plus I want to clear up that it most likely isn't microstutter, it's just stuttering. Microstutter would make it feel slower than the actual framerate. You wouldn't notice the individual stutters because they are micro.

 

[Ketchup]

Possibly a bad codec is being used. What do have have installed for that, in addition to what you listed?

As for YouTube, are you using Flash? If so, disable Flash in your browser and see if videos play better without it.

 

[jkauff]

I suspect some background process is causing this. You're probably decoding video with your CPU. If some cycle-hogging process kicks in while you're watching the video, it could affect the decoding and cause dropped frames.

MPC-HC has LAV filters built in for decoding. Go into LAV Video setup and choose either QuickSync (if it's available) or CUDA hardware decoding to take your CPU out of the picture. If that fixes the problem, start looking for software that's doing an intermittent background scan or update check or something similar and try to disable it. It could even be Windows automatically defragging your drives in the background.

 

[zebrax2]

It could be frame drops due to imperfect sync with the video frame rate.

 

[truckerCLOCK]

It could be frame drops due to imperfect sync with the video frame rate.

+1

 

[sheh]

What's the monitor you use, and what refresh rate? Check the MPC-HC stats you get with Ctrl-J with the EVR renderer, and maybe with madVR. Look into getting 23.976 and 24Hz modes working, try different vsync modes, and check ReClock if needed.