General discussion • Pi 400/5 stutter when playing videos (vlc,mpv) in most cases

I'm having issues with stuttering when playing videos for the most part.
I have tried playing videos from a normal Desktop installation on pi 5 with the same results,
though generally I use Lite and then install the things I want.

As far as I can tell from cpu usage this is not a bottleneck there (perhaps it might be for mpv as it uses a lot compared to vlc for me)
The video I use for testing is a white bar moving left and right on a black background,
it's in HEVC 10bit, but I also got a h264 version which behaves the same (I can provide them if need be).

So I have tried installing X11 with i3 and playing a video with VLC or MPV.

[X11]
With VLC (window mode) it will stutter and have tearing.
With MPV (window mode I can only get it to work it to work with --vo=x11/xv which behave similar to the above.
With VLC (fullscreen) it plays fine, it uses vout mmal_xsplitter by default, but --vout=drm_vout also works great.

[Headless]
VLC with --vout=drm_vout works great.
MPV with --vo=drm stutter and drops a lot of frames.

[Wayfire]
With VLC (window mode) it will stutter but not with the same hiccups, it's a consistent stutter,
playing with -v shows I get a ton of:
main video output warning: picture is too late to be displayed (missing 14 ms)
I can't get MPV to work:
[vo/gpu] Failed initializing any suitable GPU context!

With VLC (fullscreen) it works great as before.

I am trying to make a kiosk to play videos and images, and VLC does work in fullscreen,
but sadly it will "restart" when it changes to the next file so it's a smooth transition.

mpv seems to work great in that regard if only I could solve the stuttering / frame drops.

Statistics: Posted by zerowalker — Mon Nov 03, 2025 5:52 am

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