Stutter Troubleshooting

[ptaylor]

I've been trying to help a friend fix their playback issues with Sage.

Symptom:
Random stuttering during playback. Sometimes stutters will occur within seconds of each other, other times they can be minutes apart. He can rewind after a stutter has occured and that segment plays back properly, leading us to believe it's not an issue with recording. Further, DVD playback stutters similarly also, even in PowerDVD.

What's been tried:

He has tried using the nVidia codec, the SageTV codec, and the Cyberlink codec, all which exhibit the stutter.
He has tried running in both Overlay and VMR9 modes, both stutter.
He's tried disabling 3D accelleration, still stutters.
He's got 64K cluster size on the video partition of his 250 GB SATA drive. (The OS partition has 4K clusters)
He's currently running Sage as a Service. The stuttering is worse if he turns off the service and runs Sage standalone.

He's tried the registry setting change mentioned in another post about stuttering.. (Don't recall the registry setting exactly.. Something about thread priority, I think)

He has upgraded to Java 1.5_06, but the problem still exists. (Originally, he was simply using the Java that comes with Sage)

He originally was using an eVGA nVidia 7300GS card. I had him try my PNY nVidia 6600 (which plays back fine on my machine). After reinstalling the latest drivers, he still experienced the stutter. (He has since re-installed the 7300GS)

He's tried both the latest nVidia drivers for MCE and the latest drivers for XP Pro (which are newer than the MCE drivers). He's even tried the latest beta drivers for XP Pro.

The motherboard is an ASUS P5PL2 and he's running a Celeron D 336 (2.8 Ghz) with two Crucial 512 MB sticks of RAM. This machine runs Windows XP MCE 2005 with the two MCE services disabled.

Is there something basic that we are missing? Something BIOS level, perhaps?

Thanks,
Paul

[Motofreak75]

this might be a shot in the dark, but has your buddy check in device manager, under sata controllers,

When I installed my one of my 500gig sata 3g drives, for some silly really Winblows decided to turn down my sata speed to below normal ata drive speeds (look under transfer mode in Primary/secondary tab), making everything stutter and poor performance. Once I manual turned it up, it cleared up and I was back watching hdtv shows again.

Again this fixed my problem and it might with your friends machine, its easy to check and its another thing you can check off on your list, to troubleshoot this problem your friend has.

[ptaylor]

I'll have him check into this... Thanks.

[Mortanis]

Given everything you've tried, I have to say this is probably far below your level of expertise, but is the drive the Sage video files on regularly defragged? When I first started up with sage so long ago, i ran into a stuttering problem after a few weeks of watching shows - fragmentation was screwing my reading and writing up. I wrote a simple VBScript that I task to run every night and defrag all my drives, and haven't had a problem since.

[JUC]

I don't believe you have to defrag disks formatted with 64k clusters...

[blade]

The fact that it stutters with DVDs would suggest that fragmentation isn't the problem.

It seems you've tried about everything I can think of. Is he using the latest release of DX? There are several different releases of version 9.0c.

[Wheemer]

What about FSE, did you try that?

[DJD]

In the file Sage.properties, try setting the "seeker_periodically_scan_library" value to 'false'. Setting that value to 'true' is the only thing that causes my system to stutter.

Windows (XP Home w/ SP2) reports that both of my Sage drives are 50-90% fragmented, but I haven't seen the need to defragment them (64k clusters). Actually, I defragged one of them previously, and it inserted repeating segments into every previously-recorded show.

By the way, do your TV shows and DVDs stutter when played outside of Sage?

[ptaylor]

Tonight I've given him the REALLY latest nVidia drivers.. 84.56 I believe. (Just today we ran across these on the eVGA.com site, newer than the ones on nVidia's own site, oddly enough.)

In addition, I've told him to look at the settings to ensure that the drives are operating in DMA mode instead of PIO. I have only seen these settings under the "Primary IDE Channel" and "Secondary IDE Channel" devices, though.

Mortanis:
I don't think fragmentation is the issue, as he's had this problem since day one on a freshly built machine. (We bought all the parts specifically for a Sage server.) He's only been using the machine for about 3 weeks now.

Blade:
I can't say which release of Direct X he's using, other than 9.0c. We did a fresh install of Window XP MCE 2005 w/ SP2. From there, we just did all the updates from Windows Update. If there is another 9.0c version that is preferable, please point me that way.

Wheemer:
We haven't tried FSE mode on his machine. I've tried it on two of my machines and have issues with it crashing when changing from full screen to windowed mode, so I didn't suggest that he try it.

DJD:
I don't think he's tried playing a TV show he recorded outside of Sage, but he has watched a DVD in PowerDVD and it exhibits the same stutter. I'll suggest having him change that in the Properties file when I see him tomorrow.

Thanks for all the help everyone... If I can get this figured out, I'll be sure to post what the problem was. If anyone else has any further suggestions, let me know.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by ptaylor

Blade:
I can't say which release of Direct X he's using, other than 9.0c. We did a fresh install of Window XP MCE 2005 w/ SP2. From there, we just did all the updates from Windows Update. If there is another 9.0c version that is preferable, please point me that way.

DirectX 9 April 2006

DirectX Redistributable April 2006

Gerry

[blade]

Originally Posted by Wheemer

What about FSE, did you try that?

Since it's stuttering with Overlay as well I doubt FSE would help.

[ptaylor]

Update:

Unfortunately, none of the suggestions posted have helped, thus far.

But, last night I think we found something: Using Perfmon, we've narrowed it down to a Paging problem. We ran Perfmon while watching a video recorded in Sage. When there is stuttering in the video, there is a spike in Page Faults shown in Perfmon. Since Perfmon allows you to specify individual processes to watch, we plan to use it to determine which process is causing the Page Faults.

Paul

[Opus4]

So you mean something is using a lot of memory & keeps swapping memory out to disk? Do you have an antivirus program installed? If so, make sure it is set to exclude your video recording directories (and maybe the SageTV install dir) from any autoscanning -- it might be scanning the video all the time during playback.

- Andy

[roxy99]

I am using the DX 9 well before the April 2006 release that Gerry pointed to. I have no problems on DX 9 that comes with Win XP SP2. So its not DX 9 that is your problem.

Why don't you simply remove unneeded processes and keep your windows environment as simple as possible? Norton is a known culprit for slowing down systems. Frankly, if you use a dedicated Sage PC and limit its use to only that, then you don't need an antivirus program.

[ptaylor]

He doesn't have any anti-virus program installed... It is a very simple install, actually... That's why I don't understand why he's having these issues. Hopefully he will be able to pinpoint which process is causing the issue.

About the only thing he's doing that is a bit unusual is this machine serves as an Internet gateway for his wife's laptop. She doesn't use it often, though, so I wouldn't expect that to be the problem. He's using Window's ICS to share the dial-up modem in the Sage machine. (The Sage machine needs to be able to dial out whenever it needs to update the EPG anyhow)...

Before anyone says that he should just get DSL, it isn't offered yet where he lives... (Neither is Cable Internet access) I'm pretty sure he's not open to moving..

Paul

[blade]

Originally Posted by roxy99

I am using the DX 9 well before the April 2006 release that Gerry pointed to. I have no problems on DX 9 that comes with Win XP SP2. So its not DX 9 that is your problem.

There are several different versions and just because one person doesn't have a problem doesn't mean it will work for someone else. Some of the older releases are known to cause stuttering and others make FSE totally unusuable.

It doesn't appear this problem is Dx related. Maybe they can track it down soon.

[azakinthinos]

I had a recent experience that might be usefull. I had a stutter free system before I installed a new capture card. All of a sudden I would get sttuter. The stuttering was very consistent. I pulled my hair out for a while then I noticed that the graphics card was sharing an IRQ with the new capture card. I disabled the capture card from the device manager and everything was fine again. I enable the capture card and I get stutter.

Try going to the device manager to see if the graphics card is sharing an IRQ with any device. If it is then move the card to another slot. I unfortunately can't do this because all of my PCI slots are taken up so I need to try palying around to see if some other combination of cards works. For the record, I have a Nvidia 6600 based video card.

[blade]

I didn't notice before that he's using SATA drives. I think some SATA controllers cause problems. I'm not 100% sure, but I think it was stuttering problems. It has been discussed on these forums awhile back.

If the page faults lead doesn't pan out you might want to look at the SATA controller.

[DFA]

The SATA controller you refer to is the Silicon Image 3112 and can be used to set up Raid 0 or Raid 1 as well. For the most part, all of the traffic on this controller focuses on trouble with the Avermedia A180. The general concensus is that there is a driver conflict with the A180. A number of people having problems with the A180 and the SiI 3112 have substituted various other cards such as Fusion and claim the problem goes away all other things being equal. The other test has been to move the video recording directory for the A180 to a PATA drive and also claim the problem then goes away this way as well. In other words, the SiI 3112 and the A180 don't play nice together (not anything simple like IRQ issue). I gather the finger has come to point at the A180 driver. Aver is aware of all this and is supposedly going to release a new driver in the very near future.

Why do I know so much on this? I have SiI 3112 controller with 2 - 250 GB SATA drives hooked to it in Raid 0. I also have A180. Together, they suck big time and anything recorded is badly messed up and unwatchable. Not the same story for HD coming to the same SiI controller via the Firewire link. I can use WatchHDTV with the A180 to watch flawless video being rendered directly to the video card while Sage is simultaneously asleep in the tray but recording same stream to the SATA drives. The recordings are toast; way beyond periodic studdering anoyances; complete garbage.

I don't use the A180 at this time and just wait for the new driver Aver has promised. I may get tired of waiting and get a VBox (trade?).

DFA

[ptaylor]

Yes, he is using SATA drives. His motherboard is an ASUS P5PL, which uses the 945PL chipset and I think it has an Intel SATA controller...

One thing I did notice is that on the product spec page (http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1...41&modelmenu=1) it states:

Serial ATA is the next generation ATA specification that provides scalable performance for today and tomorrow. With up to 150MB/s data transfer rate, Serial ATA is faster than current Parallel ATA, while providing 100% software compatibility.

Now, the SATA drive he has is a 3.0 drive... I would expect it to be backwards compatible, though. Anyone with experience here?