Hi guys! So…I have a beefy AMD PC, CPU AMD 7700, GPU 7800XT 16GB, 32GB RAM. Maybe not top of the line, but definitely capable of playing about any kind of video. Well…not with SMPlayer! I get a slightly choppy playback. Like, if the movie being played is 24.97FPS, it feels to be playing at…23FPS? It’s hard to tell as there’s no obvious proof of what I’m saying. It’s usually ok on normal dialog scenes, but super noticeable when the the camera pans around. It can be very distracting.
But VLC on default settings plays the same file consistently better, no noticeable jitter. This applies to about any 1080p/4K file. Also not crazy bandwidth nor anything, a bit under 2GB for 1h worth of video on most TV shows. SMPlayer uses video output driver - GPU, and in Performance, hardware decoding is set to Auto. I’ve toyed with several of these settings (vdpau, vulkan, wayland-copy…about anything available in the lists), to no avail. I have checked both with mplayer or mpv as multimedia engine (by default it’s specified as ‘other’ and then the /usr/bin/mpv). Either option has differences, but still get the same…choppy playback. Any idea of what could be wrong? I have no clue on how to troubleshoot this. I’m using NobaraLinux (Fedora 42, KDE plasma edition).
EDIT: It seems to be refresh rate. The videos are 24, or 24.97FPS, and that doesn’t convert well to 60Hz. If depending on the video file I change the output to the TV to 24Hz or 50Hz (I don’t have 25 nor 40Hz) then the playback seems perfectly smooth. My follow-up question would be, how can I do this automatically from SMPlayer? Is there a way it either adjusts the screen refresh rate, or interpolates the playback FPS to account for the existing refresh rate?
Playing 24fps on a 60hz monitor is often bad. You could try setting the monitor to 48hz temporarily.
This might be a very good point. But then, how can I play it properly on vlc? Is there a way for smplayer to handle this?
EDIT: So you nailed, and it IS refresh rate. So, I changed the screen refresh rate to 50Hz, but for the Alien episodes, the video is 24FPS, so not a perfect match, but better than 60Hz. And indeed, the video jittered less frequently, more like little spasms. And so I went again and changed the screen to 24Hz. And there you go, perfect playback.
Now my question still stands…how come VLC manages this rather well without having to tinker with the refresh rate for every damn video file? Is there any setting I could use on SMplayer to account for FPS->Hz conversion?
Try turning on or off hardware acceleration in the settings.
Tried… Gpu, vdpau, vulkan. They all work. I don’t think it’s dropping frames. But I see the jitter.
Did you try disabling hardware acceleration though?
Do you see it with all videos? Could be a problem with a specific encoding parameters that some videos use.
Also, have you installed codecs from rpmfusion? You need them for hardware decoding with non-flatpak players (and browsers) since Fedora complies with US patent law and don’t have those codecs by default, and uses h264 codec from Cisco instead which sucks. What does vainfo command says (you may need to install libva-utils)?
Thanks I’ll try this.
EDIT: Seems Nobara might include these by default. Basically Nobara is a Fedora with a lot of gaming/multimedia/GPU tweaks to make it pretty gaming ready.
U definitely not enabled hard acceleration in settings choose auto-safe in the list
As i said, it is enabled. I tested it and it runs fine. But it jitters. Even with acceleration off, this computer is more than capable of playing video off of the cpu and not dropping a single frame.
