Skip background grabber/blur while playing to avoid microstutters#73
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Skip background grabber/blur while playing to avoid microstutters#73pannal wants to merge 1 commit into
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The service loop runs grabfanart() - several synchronous JSON-RPC library queries - every ~200s, plus ImageBlur() every tick. On weaker devices this briefly starves the video render thread and causes single-frame drops / microstutters during playback. The backgrounds these feed aren't visible during fullscreen playback, so gate the timed tasks on not Player().isPlaying(). isPlaying() (rather than isPlayingVideo()) is used so a brief pause or seek - where isPlayingVideo() can momentarily read false - can't let the grabber slip through and hitch playback on resume.
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Ship the playback-gate fix on the latest upstream base (2.0.9) too, so users already on upstream 2.0.9 receive it (Kodi installs the highest version; a 2.0.8-p3i.1-only repo would not win over a stock 2.0.9). 2.0.8-p3i.1 retained as a minimal-delta fallback. Upstream PR: sualfred/script.embuary.helper#73
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While debugging microstutters on an Amlogic CoreELEC box during video playback, I traced single dropped frames back to this addon's service loop.
Service.start()callsgrabfanart()every ~200s, which fires several synchronous JSON-RPC library queries (VideoLibrary.GetMovies/GetTVShows,AudioLibrary.GetArtists/GetMusicVideos), and it runsImageBlur()(a PIL blur) on every tick. All of that runs on the service thread. On a weaker device the burst is enough to briefly starve the video render thread, and a frame gets dropped.The log made it hard to argue with: the dropped frame landed in the same millisecond as the
Start new fanart grabber processline.These backgrounds aren't visible during fullscreen playback anyway, so the fix just defers the timed tasks until playback stops, by adding
not xbmc.Player().isPlaying()to the existing screensaver guard.One deliberate choice: I used
isPlaying()rather thanisPlayingVideo().isPlayingVideo()can briefly read false during pauses and seek/transition states, which would let the grabber slip through and hitch playback right as it resumes.isPlaying()avoids that. The trade-off is that the backgrounds won't refresh during music playback either, but they catch up as soon as playback ends.I left the version bump to you.