New to the PI! Question for a beginner.

[sethjlamb]

Hi All.

I am new to Raspberry Pi and am using a Pi 3b for a media center. Strictly Kodi with a few addons. I am using it to stream live tv as well.

I noticed that in high paced action sports, the camera angle transitions aren’t very smooth and sometimes get blurry for a split second.

Streaming 1080 movies are totally fine. This only happens on live tv. Is there any settings I can use to adjust this? Is the Pi not fast enough for this? I have been reading about over clocking. Will that help? Im running OSMC and just Kodi.

Thanks in advance.

[topguy]

Diffiult to know exactly what causes the thing you see. Do you have other devices where you can see the same stream to see that this only happens on Raspberry ?
Is your Pi using wired networking or Wifi ?

[sethjlamb]

Using it plugged in directly to ethernet. I have the 500mbps fios service. This box is maxed out and seeing close to 100 mbps during all speed tests. That should be plenty of speed. I don’t have another device to compare too. I would say that in high action live sports, that its just not as sharp as when I was say, watching the same sport on comcast cable, vs the live streaming. The stream quality is good. I was wondering if I overclocked it a little on the cpu and gpu if that would help? Maybe the cpu isn’t fast enough to process the live streaming? Is there a desired speed of a cpu and amount of ram, that would really change the quality of the picture in these live streams? I was wondering if maybe I just needed a stronger system?

[topguy]

I you press "o" during playing in Kodi you will see a good deal of information about the stream.
It will among other show CPU load, video codec, fps, dropped frames etc.
If you are right and CPU is spiking and you drop frames then its interesting to know what the codec used for the live TV.
If its MPEG2 you can buy a licence for that codec that will enable GPU decoding and free up a lot of CPU load.

I dont know what kind of streaming you use but it could also be a result of the codec and bitrate used. A lot of motion dont compress so good compared to more static scenes so you get more artifacts, especially if it using constant bitrate.

[sethjlamb]

I snapped a pic. It doesnt seem that the cpu is over working.

Is the right decoder being used? Should I be using some interlace?

[topguy]

Everything looks like it should, "omx-h264" should mean that the GPU is carrying the load, and the CPU values confirm that.

It doesnt show the bit-rate of the video, or dropped frames etc. so I cant be 100% sure, but I think what you are seeing is not caused by the Raspberry. It is limitations in mpeg4/h264 codec and the max bitrate which is used in the stream.

Its unlikely that the 720 feed is interlaced so no deinterlacing is needed unless you see some "combing".

[sethjlamb]

What is combing? Tried to find a good answer online.

I have a friend with an old xbox and I set up the same IPTV that I am using, and his graphics seem to blow away my Pi3b. I just don’t get why the stream gets a little fuzzy in some high paced action scenes? The cpu is barely working.

Would there be a benefit if I were to overclock the pi a little bit? Maybe up to 1.3 ghz

[sethjlamb]

Is that RAM Percentage high? IM watching a baseball game and it’s running at 75%.