Playback stuttering on 6.1

[litkaj]

I upgraded to 6.1 this past weekend and thus far am not terribly pleased. Aside from the background image that does not render very well at 1920x1080, my biggest complaint is that video playback now seems to drop frames every 30 seconds or so.

I'm not watching anything terribly difficult to decode ("DVD Standard Play" MPEG-2 recordings from a Hauppauge PVR-500, although MPEG-4 files also exhibit the same issue) and I have tested a few different decoders (nVidia, PowerDVD, Sage, & ffdshow). This is a problem that I had under older versions of SageTV but it was solved by enabling FSE mode. I checked and FSE is enabled, but it doesn't seem to be helping.

I checked out the properties file and noticed a few entries for thread priority of various components of the program. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what can be adjusted to make this problem go away?

[litkaj]

No? More info perhaps?

I tried migrating from JRE 1.4.2_14 to 6u1 and the problem is still there. I've also tried disabling the service and running Sage alone and that didn't fix it either. CPU usage is during playback is fairly high in the 50-70% range (all due to Sage) but it would really need to be at 100% in order to drop frames if I'm CPU limited (and again, this didn't start happening until I upgraded to 6.1.8). I've also tried switching from VMR9 to Overlay and that didn't work either.

I would really appreciate some info on the "thread priority" options in the properties file as I would assume that raising the playback priority would fix the issue (under 6.0 the GUI was less-than-responsive during playback and that now seems to have changed).

[dpackham]

hmmm... glad its not only me... I have had some skip problems. it not unwatchable but its irritating...

hope someone chimes in with a fix :)

Dave P

[litkaj]

hmmm... glad its not only me... I have had some skip problems. it not unwatchable but its irritating...

hope someone chimes in with a fix :)

Dave P

No, certainly not unwatchable, just annoying as all hell...

[litkaj]

No updates on this? Alright, I'll toss in again.

On Saturday and Sunday the stuttering went away. The only thing I had done was to close the GUI, remove the Snapstream IR adapter, add the USB-UIRT adapter, and the restart the GUI.

Late on Sunday night I noticed that the audio would start to get VERY out of sync (1-2 seconds) the longer I watched a show (it was noticeable after a little as 5 minutes). After restarting the GUI again the audio stayed in sync but I picked up the hitching again.

Any thoughts?