Showtime

In video compression the current video frame may consist of pixels taken from previous "reference" frames. This is done to reduce the file's size but has no impact on video quality at all. So for example, if MediaInfo indicates 5 ref frames, then there will be times when the media player will have to store 5 previous frames in memory in order to take pixels from them to build the current video frame. The ref frame number listed by MediaInfo is just the maximum number of frames that a player "might" have to store in memory. Most of the time during movie playback the number of ref frames is below the maximum, with ref frame spikes occurring during action scenes. However, if the media player doesn't have enough memory to store the necessary ref frames, then video studdering or audio dropout will occur. Some media players handle this out-of-memory condition better than others.

while browsing I found this: https://sites.google.com/site/linuxencoding/x264-ffmpeg-mapping

It has this:

-refs <integer> (FFmpeg)
One of H.264's most useful features is the abillity to reference frames other than the one immediately prior to the current frame. This parameter lets one specify how many references can be used, through a maximum of 16. Increasing the number of refs increases the DPB (Decoded Picture Buffer) requirement, which means hardware playback devices will often have strict limits to the number of refs they can handle. In live-action sources, more reference have limited use beyond 4-8, but in cartoon sources up to the maximum value of 16 is often useful. More reference frames require more processing power because every frame is searched by the motion search (except when an early skip decision is made). The slowdown is especially apparent with slower motion estimation methods. Recommended default: -refs 6

I'm not a programmer but does that mean you add an extra piece of code to set the refs level? So you could set a default of 6 as it says and that would fix the showtime bug?