Odd kodi stuttering behaviour happening only with Lubuntu/openbox

Lubuntu Support
1

Hi everybody and thanks for the great work!
lapto I’m using is an old Toshiba satellite : gpu amd rv610, intel core 2 duo t5250 @ 1.50ghz, 2gb ram
on lubuntu 24.04 with all the updates , flatpak kodi 21.1 and distro ppa kodi 20.5 gave the same results. Same default skin in all the circumstances

Been wanting to use this old laptop as a tvbox, and it with librelec 12 with kodi 21.1 : keeping all the tv streams not higher than 720p, had satisfying results.

But I also wanted to use this laptop as an everyday pc for easy browsing and office tasks, easily switching from browsing to tv watching, so I installed lubuntu;

from the sddm login manager, if I select kodi as desktop, I get the same good results as libreelec. if I login with the lxtq/lubuntu desktop, and even when I use the even lighter openbox window manager (no other software used), playing 720p tv streams (all legal and free) causes stuttering, the video lags so much that it’s unwatchable

If during those moments I check the system info on kodi, system memory is far from being full, and cpu usage barely reaches 20 %, so…

Any Idea on what may be the problem?

576p and 480p streams work in each of the situation mentioned above, but there are some tv streams that won’t get lower than 720p

Thanks for the help anyway!

2

Well, the only thing I can think of is the video driver? Do you know if it’s the same in all cases?

3

I think it is, I will check; anyway we could restrict the problem to openbox, actually: I installed enlightment just to try and kodi works just fine in that environment

4

There are a lot of switches and knobs in the various window managers. I’m not sure that this will help (I’m surprised noone else has jumped in on this thread as kodi is popular, but, it’s not trivial).

Anyway, did you try playing a video with VLC instead of kodi? I ask this only because openbox, VLC are bundled in/with Lubuntu and should work directly, it’s painless and it would give some hope that kodi will work on your system under openbox.