Would a "stuttering" troubleshooting writeup be a welcome contribution to the Sunshine docs?

[blakeNaccarato]

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Would a contribution expanding the stuttering section of Sunshine's Troubleshooting docs be welcome? Such a writeup would start by helping the reader to identify their specific "stuttering" symptom (e.g. sub-second vs. every few seconds vs. 10+ minute periodic stutters) and some possible pathways to solution depending on that. This would also probably involve moving the "Troubleshooting" heading to the "General" category, while pointing to truly platform-specific possible solution pathways within the body text.

Such a writeup could be pointed to when the inevitable issues and discussions get opened against LizardByte's repos. I see that a "stutter" query across the org matches 40 issues and 23 discussions at the time of writing. It would not try to exhaustively solve the issue or take on the responsibility of documenting every possible combination, but would at least give a few leads.

If such a contribution is not welcome, is there a good, centralized, end-user-oriented documentation source that such a writeup would be a better fit for? I see the Moonlight stream wiki has a choppy/laggy troubleshooting section, but it doesn't quite describe the same issues.

The issue of course is that one must first disambiguate the specific "stuttering" symptom, and the symptom could point to any number of causes. I recognize that Sunshine is just part of the broader game/desktop streaming ecosystem, and it's sensible for e.g. Sunshine's documentation not to take on the goal of answering the question of "stuttering" for the combinatorial explosion of host/client/hardware/software combinations.

Having previously encountered my own "stuttering" issue (and "solving" it by encoding at 75Hz and decoding at 60Hz, among other tweaks), I've been keeping track of various discussions of "stuttering" across the LizazrdByte org and Discord, and elsewhere. Since we're centering the discussion on the LizardByte/Sunshine side, I won't detail the laundry list of "stuttering" discussions across various Moonlight repos, Reddit, other Discords, etc. Here are a few links to "stuttering" discussed in the LizardByte org and Sunshine issues. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

• Any kind of frame limiting makes the stream (micro)stutter Sunshine#1998
• Microstuttering due to wrong capture or encoding rate: 59.94Hz instead of 60Hz Sunshine#2286
• https://github.com/orgs/LizardByte/discussions/169
• https://github.com/orgs/LizardByte/discussions/267
• https://github.com/orgs/LizardByte/discussions/398
• https://github.com/orgs/LizardByte/discussions/423

[ReenigneArcher]

Yes this would definitely be a welcomed contribution!

[blakeNaccarato]

Great! Alright well I tend to do this thing where I say I'll do something and never get around to it, so my disclaimer is if anyone else wants to start a PR on this before I get around to it, by all means do so and ping me if you want any backup. I'm not trying to "claim" this as my contribution or anything like that.

I'll take a stab at this eventually and solicit feedback in the PR and here.

Anyone who stumbles on this discussion and has other input, please reply in this specific comment's thread and post links to various miscellanea and quirks about various "stuttering" problems/solutions, etc.

Nothing is too esoteric to be discussed here, though I think it's prudent to make the docs writeup Sunshine-focused, so as not to open the Pandora's box of "now the Sunshine project is responsible for documenting all possible stuttering issues encountered ever forever".

[blakeNaccarato]

I'll start. I found a Discord discussion that helpfully highlights some GPU-specific workarounds involving vsync-toggle, frltoggle, gsynctoggle, etc. May be able to incorporate some of that advice.

Will have to be careful about recommended solutions in the docs writeup, and clarify that LizardByte is not responsible for the security implications of solution pathways outside of the LizardByte org. While not possible to account for all security concerns, when possible I will prefer to link to specific releases (and mention the hash?) to avoid the possibility of Sunshine docs pointing to a hijacked release or something crazy like that. Maybe detailing the security implications e.g. hashes would bloat the troubleshooting doc too much. I'm trying to toe the line between enough information and usefully concise.

I'll edit this with more links as I find them to avoid notification spam. Related to the above Discord discussion:

• feat(nvprefs): add V-Sync and frame limiter options Sunshine#3317
• Still jittery after all these years when Vsync on, Client and Server set to same refresh rate. Sunshine#3405