I Just wanted to post this here in case anyone else runs into the same issue I did.

 

I decided that I wanted a more robust solution than OE for the VM that is connected to my family room TV (mainly so I can use EmulationStation as my emulation frontend).  I also decided that I wanted an Ubuntu iteration and that it had to be version 15.04 or higher as kernel 4.2.x has an upgraded xpad driver that actually works.  I settled on 15.10.

 

Seemed like this should be pretty simple...install Lubuntu 15.10,  add the Kodi PPA, update/dist-upgrade, install Kodi, etc.

 

All went well until I actually tried to play an MKV (Avatar) and noticed that my CPU utilization was way higher than I would have expected.  On two cores in my OE VM, I see CPU utilization around 8% per core.  With this VM (4 cores) I was seeing anywhere between 5% and 60% as it jumped all over the place.    Obviously, GPU HW acceleration was not working as expected.

 

So, off to the Kodi forum I went and was lucky enough to get the attention of fritsch:  http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=248473

 

After some back and forth, even fritsch was unable to determine root cause.  I never did mention the words VM or KVM as I know the response I would have gotten.    However, he did ask one question that struck a cord:  "The user running kodi is in the video group?".  I remembered seeing this as a step in his VAAPI thread shown here:  http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=231955

 

Long and short of it, I ran:

 

sudo usermod -a -G cdrom,audio,video,plugdev,users,dialout,dip,input kodi

 

sudo apt-get install mesa-vdpau-drivers vdpauinfo

 

and Kodi is now happily using my GPU for HW acceleration and I am seeing CPU utilization at very low levels (where it should be).

 

John

Interesting findings.  So what GPU are you using on this system (AMD or NVIDIA)?

Radeon HD6450.

 

Had a little more discussion with fritsch and he made a good point.  When I asked why the mesa vdpau drivers are not included in the Kodi source, his response basically was "if you buy a game it doesn't come with video drivers".

 

Since OE is also providing the OS, I guess that is why we do not see this problem on that platform.

 

John

i wonder if going this route vs the openelec route could fix my issue with sound stuttering every once and a while on DTS MA / TrueHD feeds...

 

know what i'm testing this weekend.