The VideoLAN Forums

Anyone else experience this? At least on 2.1.3 and 2.1.5. Only tested x264 mkv which is what I watch normally.
If external subtitle is disabled all the stutters at the specific places are gone, but with subtitle active they are back, at the beginning of MOST new lines, not always it seems.
Most visible when lots of stuff is moving on screen of course, like panning, but even still scenes with something moving across it.

No extremely big deal, but a bit annoying when you start notice it.
Probably been for long, just made the connection to the subtitles right now.
I don't see any lost frames in the statistics after testing some minute.

Here is someone else, that got it fixed a few versions back, but I experience this with the newest versions.
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=102154

Here a more formal bugreport (not mine), explaining it well, but doesn't seem to get any real response/confirmation.
https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/10200

Trying MPC-HC and wow, that is smooth, no stutter at all, and subtitles work great.
The problem is MPC-HC look like --please stay polite--.
I think the thing with that player is its supposed to look like crap unless you take a doctors degree in it and spend years downloading and enabling plugins and stuff :/
Oh well, I'll just have to decide what is most important, image quality or smooth playback, and I think it might be the latter cause when you start notice those stutters at each subtitle line it drives you crazy

Well, quality is really too bad (at least on SD-content) in MPC-HC.
Trying some more with VLC, and increasing file cashing from 300ms to 2000ms (not sure this makes any difference but guess it doesn't hurt), and skipping the H264 loop filter, actually makes the "subtitle-stutter" a little bit better I think.
Not gone, but maybe a little less noticable, and maybe so I can endure it for now.

I think that loop setting might have altered image quality a little bit on the negative side, but rather that than more stutter...

VLC is not synchronized on the vertical blanking. Due to scheduling jitter on the computer, microstutter is hardly avoidable. Besides, the video frame rate is not typically a divisor of the monitor refresh rate.

Someone with motivation, skills and affected hardware may be able to improve performance a bit, but a generic and complete solution is not possible. Patch welcome.

Thanks for feedback.
This was not about regular stutter, which mostly is a fact and evenly distributed when watching on pc monitor at least - this was about short hickups in video at beginning of most new subtitle lines on screen.
I don't know how it could affect performance, just displaying text, on modern quadcore CPU:s, but at least I and some others (see my links in first post) are affected by this.
Maybe text could be precashed just like video is cashed from file, or whatever could be the cause, very strange :/

If only I and two more can see this though, I understand its not an issue anyone wants to dig into.
Most people probably watch without subs also.
Maybe dependens on gfx/OS too, Intel integrated and Win 8.1 over here.