After trying an upgrade from 16.1 to 17 most recent beta as of today, video no longer plays well at all. Sound is choppy and video is worse than choppy, barely anything at all. I have tried this on local and streaming sources with no change in results. I have also tried a few different source formats, SD480, HD720, HD1080, mp4, mkv, etc, making sure it was not a specific decoder, file format or resolution causing the issue. Prior to the upgrade, all of the files tested played perfect, no issues at all. I have since downgraded to 16.1 and all is back to working normally, perfectly just as it was.
Given that 16.1 provides no issues at all and 17 is basically non-functional, I am hoping it is just a setting that may need to be adjusted. I also want to note that I first tried v17 around alpha 1 or 2. At that time, I had major problems as well and reverted back to 16. Since that time, my OS has been reinstalled for the upgrade in Ubuntu. Yes, reinstalled, not upgraded. I note this because the issues are still there and would appear it is not OS installation issues. the laptop however is the same, so hardware is not ruled out. I do not have any hardware issues though, without without Kodi in use.
I can also note that the interface works faster on 17 than on 16. Everything is nice until video playback is attempted.
Ubuntu 16.10 64-bit
GPU: Mesa DRI Intel 945GM
OpenGL: 1.4 Mesa 12.0.3
RAM: 3250MB
CPU: Core2 T7200 @ 2.00GHz
Free disk space ~56GB