Occasional Frame Drop and Pixelation "Taken" by Spielberg

[joltman]

I've just purchased the Taken TV show from Steven Spielberg on DVD. Brand new today. I've ripped it using MakeMKV 1.9.8 x64 on Ubuntu 15.04. I've tried different discs and ripping multiple times, but each time I get the occasional pixelation and occasional frame drops. Audio never drops. I've not had any issues when ripping my BluRays. I am not doing any transcoding, just straight rips. I've even tried ripping the files directly with DVD Decryptor, then using MakeMKV on those files. Same issue.

My equipment is an Intel i5-4570T with an external USB3.0 LG BluRay RW drive (BD RE HL-DT-ST BE14NU40 1.00) with a 256GB Samsung SSD and 16GB of RAM. I'm ripping directly to the SSD which has 128GB free. I then upload the files to my OmniOS NAS via gigabit ethernet. I can saturate a gigabit connection (~110MB/s).

The HTPC I'm playing these files on is the same CPU as above. Again, on gigabit ethernet. I know my home network isn't at fault. I've tried replaying these files and the pixelation and frame drops happen at the same point, every time. What can I do to fix this? Should I follow this http://www.makemkv.com/faq/item/8?

[Woodstock]

Is it primarily in action scenes, or where there are large changes between frames? If you watch a scene several times, does the pixelation always occur at the same spot, or does it "move around"?

I would not suspect the rip of being bad unless you can consistently see the same problem at the same place in the video. My next test would be to take a scene where the problem appeared, and step through it frame by frame, if your player supports that (VLC requires you to turn on advanced controls to do this easily, not sure about other players).

The normal fall-back mode for a player that is being overwhelmed by data is to sacrifice the video to keep the audio synchronized. While your setup should not suffer from network lag, it is still possible. At least you're not dealing with the problem of trying to get wifi to act properly!

[joltman]

Is it primarily in action scenes, or where there are large changes between frames? If you watch a scene several times, does the pixelation always occur at the same spot, or does it "move around"?

I'm not sure if it's "frame drop" or if the ripping process inserted black frames. The black frames happen in the exact same spot each time I watch the video. In some scenes, there's fast motion, in others there is little to no motion.

I would not suspect the rip of being bad unless you can consistently see the same problem at the same place in the video. My next test would be to take a scene where the problem appeared, and step through it frame by frame, if your player supports that (VLC requires you to turn on advanced controls to do this easily, not sure about other players).

The normal fall-back mode for a player that is being overwhelmed by data is to sacrifice the video to keep the audio synchronized. While your setup should not suffer from network lag, it is still possible. At least you're not dealing with the problem of trying to get wifi to act properly!

Well, now I feel dumb. I just played the same video on my Lenovo laptop (T440s, i7-4600U, 12GB RAM, Intel AC WiFi) over WiFi. The laptop is running Windows 10 x64 and VLC 2.2.1. The video played perfectly. However, over my HTPC running Kodi (15.2 Isengard) I'm getting those black frames and pixelation. It happens in the same spot every single time I play the video. I've got other videos I've ripped from DVDs where this doesn't happen. They're all MPEG2 720x480. I've got full size BluRay rips and this doesn't happen. This doesn't look like a bandwidth issue. This must be a Kodi problem.

Sorry for the noise!!

[joltman]

After doing some reading, this is not a problem with Kodi. This is a Linux/Intel video driver issue. I'm trying to find a solution.