Clipping, stuttering audio during playback on analog headphone output

[MoojMidge]

Hi I am running libreelec on a raspberry pi 4 with 8GB.

I am using the youtube plugin to, yes, watch youtube.

It comes to my attention, that some, not all,  videos generate clipping, stuttering audio during playback on analog headphone output.

I do not think it is a bandwidth issues, as buffer is allways well filled es indicated in the search bar.
Also cpu overload I rule out as cpu load is at 30 % max on the most busy core.
I am running on moderate 1680x1050p@60Hz and I have already restricted the stream format to only use h264 and 2.0 audio.

I have a logfile here, with a good and a bad example of a stream.

https://paste.kodi.tv/liqivukora

Bad stream starts at 2025-08-06 17:45:29.442

Good stream starts at 2025-08-06 17:46:24.837

Some more testing unveals, that the issue is only present when routing audio to analog headphone jack ... not on hdmi.

Anyone has an idea, what might be the reason for the issue ? Ore even how to solve it ?

Best 
Stephan

Originally posted by StephanS in https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=356934&pid=3238810#pid3238810

liqivukora.txt

[DjDiabolik]

There's something that has happened to me a couple of times, and it always happens when I watch videos from a certain channel/YouTubers... I'll show you... this:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqDWV3NcWzKQPJ0P3s7p6PQ

It happens completely randomly. And as I said above, it only seems to happen with this channel.
Basically, a few seconds after I start watching a video, the playback starts to stutter. Frames are skipped and Kodi seems to stutter and become unresponsive.

What I noticed today, through the skin that shows it, is that when this happens, I see CPU usage levels skyrocket and the CPU temperature also rises to around 70/80°.

In two or three cases, all I had to do was close the video and reopen it after a few seconds, and playback was perfect without the slightest error.

To date, the problem is truly random. I have tried to make it happen spontaneously, but I cannot replicate it on demand.
If in time x this becomes more frequent, I will log it in an issue.

For now, I am reporting it in a thread that seems to deal with a similar problem.

[MoojMidge]

The original issue appears to be related to incorrect frame rate matching.

Unsure why Kodi was not able to detect and match the correct video frame rate from the actual video stream, but it is a known issue that the frame rate that is reported by YouTube is often incorrect.

I checked one video from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqDWV3NcWzKQPJ0P3s7p6PQ and it was a 30 fps video, while the default behaviour of this addon would be to indicate to Kodi that the frame rate was 29.97 fps, and then allow Kodi to properly detect and match the real frame rate.

You can try to disable frame rate hinting to see if that is indeed the cause of your issue:
YouTube addon > Settings > General > Stream features > Disable all framerate hinting

[DjDiabolik]

YouTube addon > Settings > General > Stream features > Disable all framerate hinting

Lol.. i have all this voices in italian....

So I think that's correct.

[MoojMidge]

If you manage to get a log of the problem I can have a look.

[DjDiabolik]

If you manage to get a log of the problem I can have a look.

Lol, thanks for your time.
But anyway, it's a problem that can easily be ignored...That is, if Kodi doesn't crash completely. Like in the other case, sometimes some videos won't be fully playable.
Then if we understand why, fine... otherwise, so be it :)