How I fixed jerky playback

[jkoutrouba]

I have no idea if this will help anyone else out there, but I'll post this just in case it's useful.

I was having trouble with HDTV regularly, and DVDs to some extent, jerking and pausing during playback. Audio was OK. For the high def content, this would happen more or less constantly (at least once every second or two), though worse during panning and action. For DVDs, it was occasionally and irregularly. I did not mess with any of the registry hacks or .dll changes, but instead fruitlessly tried combination after combination of Overlay, VMR9, blah, blah, blah.

I am running a 2.8 GHz P4 with an 800 MHz front side bus and 1 GB PC3200 dual channel DDR RAM. I'm outputting through a Rosewill 256 MB Radeon 9600 video card. I could not believe that I did not have enough power to watch a DVD! I tried the 3.0.7b version of Sage figuring the FSE mode might help, but started to have lockup problems so I switched back to 2.2.8. I upgraded to Catalyst 5.8 and the latest PureVideo decoder (can't remember the version, sorry.) Nothing seemed to help.

In the end, I rolled back to Catalyst 5.5 (not sure if it mattered, but I was desperate). Currently that is what I'm running. I fixed my problems by opening the Catalyst Control Center and, while in "Advanced" view (chose under the Views menu) I selected the "Standard Settings" item under the "3D" group. This brings up a little video clip of a car driving down a road with various features cruising by. I set the slider to the left for "Optimal Performance" and unchecked the "Use custom settings" box. It was like magic. I may have effectively turned off all hardware acceleration or something, but it works for me. I hope it helps you, too.


-JK

[dale_ander]

I fixed my intermittent jerky video problem by making the drive I was recording to the master drive instead of the slave. I'd tried making sure the drive wasn't fragmented and while it seemed to help the problem did not go away. Until I opened up my HTPC and moved some drives around so that I could make the drive I record my shows on to the master drive.