Hello people! Yesterday I tried to use my UDOO advanced to watch streamed contents from Sky Go but it was a little disappointing, looks like the CPU is not capable of decoding the video streams without stuttering or framerate drops. Sky Go platform uses Silverlight as the frontend. UDOO was connected via HDMI to a 4K TV and the screen resolution was set to 4K. CPU usage is high (around 70-80%) I'll continue experimenting with the board to find a setup which allows a flawless content delivery. Let's discuss about that here. Sky Go is the streaming platform from the satellite television operator Sky, which allows its subscribers to watch their bundles through the internet, it's quite popular in Italy.
I've seen some screen artifacts happen if the CPU gets too hot. Try adding a fan to see if this improves. Even a desk fan would work just to test.
What issue are you talking about? I've got no problems with Silverlight, Sky Go is working, it's just not fluid enough.
The video should be using hardware acceleration ie not using the CPU to decode the video but passing it to VPU (thats the point of having it). Because the content is DRM protected it is causing an issue (which is an on going saga for Sky Go) and reverts to the CPU for video decoding.
Silverlight is depreciated - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight Sky and Now TV should stop forcing viewers to use antiquated plug-ins, like other providers have done, for example Amazon - https://www.geekwire.com/2015/amazo...b-player-moving-beyond-silverlight-and-flash/
@diglo Stutter is a tell-tale sign of thermal throttling. (Here I am assuming your UDOO x86 is the Advanced version using N3160 SoC.) You can use a thermal monitoring program to verify that. Although N3160 has many fancy features with many integrated sub-components, please still remember it's an ATOM processor with just 6W TDP and merely 4W of SDP. N3160's GPU + CPU combined altogether is subjected to that SDP limit which is a very low bar: 4W limit. Decoding DRM'ed 4K UHD stream has never been an easy feast (CPU uses AES-NI to decode, Dolby or other non-accelerated audio or even video decoded by CPU, then adding: assuming already optimized -- GPU to perform compressed video decoding.) You can try forced-air SOC cooling (and try use better thermal coupling compound.) My previous experience on a similar SOC is that it simply just delay when the stutter will happen after the cold boot. Intel is selling those ATOM processors Silvermont/Goldmont architecture SoC very cheap. If you buy a regular CORE based CPU with the proper architecture and typically 30-60W TDP CPU, (I call it real Intel CPU, not the teaser ATOM toy) you'll see a much better result. But the latter, often by CPU itself, costs more than the entire UDOO x86 assembly! There is no such thing as the best of the world (think: thrifty Toyota Prius competing in Formula One space...) ccs_hello
Sky Go works well on tables and smarthpones which do not use expensive CPUs, so i'ts just a matter of optimization here. I've been able to obtain a barely acceptable viewing quality by setting the screen resolution to 1920x1080 and installing a fan for the heatsink but it's still not as fluid as a normal PC/laptop. The frame rate occasionally drops and falls back to a lower quality. CPU Temperature is 45-50°C Cpu usage is around 70% I'm using Internet Explorer, as the new version of Chrome is not yet supported by Sky Go.
Tablet/smartphone in HD mode probably can only offer 720P or 1080 resolution. Hmmm... this actually brought up an interesting question, how high the resolution can go on Sky Go native stream? (4K UHD monitor does not mean Sky Go is feeding that UHD to the PC but just the PC itself the GPU does the scaling...)
Sky is finally using a proprietary media player windows app which looks more optimized. Playback is good at 1920x1080x60hz. Now working on a wrapper to control the app via a remote. diglo
