Hi guys! So...I have a beefy AMD PC, CPU AMD 7700, GPU 7800XT 16GB, 32GB RAM. Maybe not top of the line, but definitely capable of playing about any kind of video. Well...not with SMPlayer! I get a slightly choppy playback. Like, if the movie being played is 24.97FPS, it feels to be playing at...23FPS? It's hard to tell as there's no obvious proof of what I'm saying. It's usually ok on normal dialog scenes, but super noticeable when the the camera pans around. It can be very distracting.
But VLC on default settings plays the same file consistently better, no noticeable jitter. This applies to about any 1080p/4K file. Also not crazy bandwidth nor anything, a bit under 2GB for 1h worth of video on most TV shows. SMPlayer uses video output driver - GPU, and in Performance, hardware decoding is set to Auto. I've toyed with several of these settings (vdpau, vulkan, wayland-copy...about anything available in the lists), to no avail. I have checked both with mplayer or mpv as multimedia engine (by default it's specified as 'other' and then the /usr/bin/mpv). Either option has differences, but still get the same...choppy playback. Any idea of what could be wrong? I have no clue on how to troubleshoot this. I'm using NobaraLinux (Fedora 42, KDE plasma edition).
EDIT: It seems to be refresh rate. The videos are 24, or 24.97FPS, and that doesn't convert well to 60Hz. If depending on the video file I change the output to the TV to 24Hz or 50Hz (I don't have 25 nor 40Hz) then the playback seems perfectly smooth. My follow-up question would be, how can I do this automatically from SMPlayer? Is there a way it either adjusts the screen refresh rate, or interpolates the playback FPS to account for the existing refresh rate?
Did you try disabling hardware acceleration though?
It seems to be a refresh rate <-> FPS incompatibility. Video files at 24 or 24.97 etc don't play great in 60Hz refresh rate. But still, VLC does something that makes it much smoother.