I realize that desktop based HTPCs are out of fashion today but my Kodi machine is an i7 3770K machine overclocked to 4.3ghz with a Radeon HD 7950 on it. It pulls double duty as the home theater machine and as a games machine with Steam Big Picture Mode. Two weeks ago I picked up a Samsung 4K 65″ UHD TV and even with my somewhat older hardware, it only took a DisplayPort 1.2a to HDMI 2.1a adaptor to get 4K@60hz output of it. I always liked this box because when it came to software decoding it could handle everything. I previously did a thread asking about Kodi’s inefficiency with HEVC 60hz videos, all my files on hand for testing just buried the needle and the answer we came to was simple: The Windows port of Kodi is 32bit and 32bit FFMPEG is massively inefficient at the task. 64bit programs using 64bit FFMPEG have no issue. But this was all purely academic and for all my 24-30fps things the 3770K seemed to be powerful enough.
And then last night day I had a real file, not some benchmark for tinkering, and Kodi couldn’t keep up. What I’d never tested was a really aggressively encoded HEVC Main10 encode but I encountered that with a copy of The Grand Tour. Kodi hit a wall. Kodi was just kissing that wall, it barely dropped any frames but was often 200-300ms behind on the audio and it never could ‘quite’ get it to sync up. The CPU just couldn’t quite keep up using the 32bit build FFMPEG at the heart of Kodi. And I’m just a bit disappointed. Not in Kodi or the Devs, but in this box that till last night, ate everything that was thrown at it. A Shield Android TV would have played that file without any problems even but this big fat Wintel box wasn’t up to task.
I get the problem, it’s that Kodi’s 64bit windows build is not a high priority and even HEVC 4K content is not frequently encountered yet for those who would be using a Wintel Kodi machine without hardware decoding. I understand the current solutions that I could take today: A new CPU with hardware decoding or a new GPU with hardware decoding. Well, that or finding more processing power, my six core i7 4930K at 4.6ghz desktop was up to the task but that is a huge CPU to use for Kodi. I can hope for the Windows build of Kodi to go 64bit but I understand that there’s obviously more pressing issues and a lot of builds and features to maintain.
It just kinda sucks, you know?