Odd playback issue, pause 3 seconds, then quick catchup?

[IncredibleHat]

I've noticed this a lot lately/recently with SageTV and playing back recordings.

The issue:

• Randomly during playback of a show, it will 'pause' the video for about 3 seconds, then do this really fast FF catchup. The sound does NOT hiccup or pause at all during this. Only the image.


A few things I have come to the conclusion thus far:

• The recorded shows are fine. As the point in which it will pause, is never in the same spot twice. I can do a quick rewind and watch that spot again, and it won't do that.

• Audio is unaffected. It plays on perfectly fine, even though the image has paused, then does the fast forward catchup.

• Changing recording quality anywhere from DVD Extra Long, to DVD Standard, has no affect.

• I don't believe this has anything to do with my capture card. As I said, the show appears fine, and plays back fine like in zoomplayer.


It may be a sage thing, or it could be a graphics card thing, or maybe even a decoder codec issue? Its really strange. It's "mildy annoying", because it does not alter the sound, just does this short pause/recoup. Its livable if a solution can not be found... but I would love to find a solution for it. Tracking changes may be hard. The following are all things that happened in the last couple months that may be a cause:

• Bought PureVideo, and installed the 'new' version they had for download.

• Set sage to use the new nvidia codecs for playback and audio. With 'default' for everything else.

• Changed from non-FSE to FSE which cleared up stuttery and tearing of playback. This is a required setting, as I will never go back to non-fse.

• Upgraded sage to 504.

• Havnt touched my graphics card drivers... nvidia has yet to release any decent ones after 84.21.


I suspect it may be the purevideo... but I see NONE OF THIS while playing DVDs (from a commercial DVD) with the exact same codecs in zoomplayer.

Any ideas?

[Kirby]

I'd put my money on it happening whenever your server starts or stops a new recording. Thats when it happens to me.

[blade]

Originally Posted by IncredibleHat

• Havnt touched my graphics card drivers... nvidia has yet to release any decent ones after 84.21.[/b]

If you haven't tried them how do you know they're not any good? I've noticed a lot of improvement with the newer drivers. They've been doing a lot of work on the purevideo features. They've also added post processing that does edge enhancement and noise reduction via hardware. I'm not sure exactly which version it was added, but I think it wasn't until 9x.xx

[GKusnick]

When in doubt, gather more data. Make a note of what time this is happening and then check your debug logs to see what Sage is doing at that time. Also keep an eye on your CPU meter to see if it pegs when this is happening, and which process is pulling the most cycles.

[IncredibleHat]

"whenever your server starts or stops a new recording" - No, that has a distinct pause, that DOES cause the sound to 'repeat' over and over (real fast like a Er-Er-Er-Er-Er-Er) for like 2 seconds. I know of that, and just ignore it, as it ONLY happens when a new show starts to record while I'm in the middle of some other. The issue I'm talking about happens randomly. Sometimes once during a show, sometimes three or four times. I have yet to track down any corresponding activites that may cause it.

"If you haven't tried them how do you know they're not any good" - Oh, I've tried them. I just keep going back to the others. On my game machine, the new drivers have been hell. This is heavily discussed on some other forums I frequent. Its not a new thing I just pulled out of the air... many people have issues with them, and some who simply have no issues at all. They are very hit or miss right now. nVidia is fast pissing off a lot of people with them. I have confidence they will iron the drivers out though... this is nvidia, not ATI

"cpu pegged" - nope, I had been looking for that too (forgot to mention). The cpu sits around 20% most of the time (during watching). I can get it up to 80% by going to desktop and dragging a window around in circles though but I am obviously not doing this when sage is in FSE hehehee. Event viewer shows no errors occuring. I don't know where else to look.

More info:
I use SATA Raid, even though its just one SATA drive. However I did not setup the drive as a 'raid'. The nvidia drivers are just installed, and used to access the drive.

No other background processes are running. I have shut down many services a long time ago in the past when I initially installed XP.

I dont run MCE.

I usually dont come to a forum unless I've hit a wall... I am pretty good and figuring stuff out, and testing various angles. I am just pulling a blank on this one.

[Kirby]

I wonder, you are using the onboard video chip on the motherboard, I wonder if something else is sharing the interrupt with it, and that device steals some clock cycles from the vid card, not causing any sort of error that would get logged, but enough to cause the video to freeze?

[gplasky]

Get rid of ffdshow and try choosing different audio decoders.

Gerry

[IncredibleHat]

Hmm... good notion Kirby... I wonder if shared ram might be something. I've got a GB in it, with as much assigned to the onboard graphics as bios allows (128mb).

ffdshow: I have that installed to 'freshen up' DVDs within zoomplayer. Its such a miniscule cleanup effect though, that I may not even realize its gone if I uninstall it. So I will give that a try.

[blade]

Originally Posted by IncredibleHat

"If you haven't tried them how do you know they're not any good" - Oh, I've tried them. I just keep going back to the others. On my game machine, the new drivers have been hell. This is heavily discussed on some other forums I frequent. Its not a new thing I just pulled out of the air... many people have issues with them, and some who simply have no issues at all. They are very hit or miss right now. nVidia is fast pissing off a lot of people with them. I have confidence they will iron the drivers out though... this is nvidia, not ATI

Well you're missing out on a lot of improvements. I'm getting better deinterlacing, lower cpu usage, and have hardware post processing now.

I've had some problems with a few of the drivers myself all of which have been related to trying to use the new control panel. Most of the forum talk I see about drivers are gamers who care about nothing but frame rate. I've been looking for a good forum that focused on purevideo, drivers, tweaking for video playback, etc.. but haven't found one yet.

For example I ran across a thread yesterday about how either h264 or wmv9 (I forget which) was broken with certain drivers, but only on systems that did not have a CPU with SSE2. I'm sure there are probably lots of little quirks that would be handy to know.

[IncredibleHat]

Yeah... trying to find a non-gaming-related discussion about the actual technicalities of drivers, is hard to find (with actual useful information and not just a load of speculations and wishlists).

Well... after spending basically all day on trying different things out. I have not made the situation better. In fact, things seem worse now? It now does this pause-speedup much more frequently! AGH!

One thing I did do that got rid of it, was turn off FSE. Unfortunately, that means much crappier playback in general, grrrrrrr!!!

Another thing to note, is playing the exact same recording in zoomplayer, resulted in NO problems. Zoomplayer is setup to run as VMR9 renderless (also tried windowless and windowed, all of which seem to behave the same, except 'windowed' makes normal dvd menus no longer function, heh). So, why would it run fine using the same drivers/codecs/hardware in zoomplayer, when it wont run ok in Sage? I BLAME SAGE!

Things I tried today that resulted in no help:

• Reducing resolution to 720p from 768p.
• Increasing resolution to 1080p native.
• Shut off more services that were superflous (stuff like personal web sharing etc... god I hate MS for enabling all this shit by default).
• Disabled ffdshow for "Raw Video".
• Uninstalled ffdshow.
• Uninstalled VobDobSomethingrather.
• Uninstalled AC3 filter.
• Turned off all AVG services completely.
• Changed audio decoders to intervideo, and also tried sagetv default.
• Set graphics driver to "High Performance" (was "Performance").
• Also tried graphics driver to "High Quality".
• Set my SATA drive to non read/write cached.
• Defragged the videos drive, and the system drive.
• RegBoosted my registry (only 3 errors found and cleaned).
• Turned off firewire hardware in BIOS since it was using the same IRQ as the SATA drive.
• Shut down unused pci slots in bios.
• Manually entered timings for my ram (even though the 'auto' settings were correct).

Bad things discovered:

• Setting video decoder to intervideo noncss with FSE enabled, would result in a solid hang on picture a few minutes into watching. Only a forced hard reboot could get out of it.
• SATA non-cached ran like snot in general.

Tomorrow attempts:

• Going to try out various 9x.xx drivers, including the newest beta 92.91 drivers I am currently testing on my game rig (which seem better than all the 91.x drivers, but still not as good as 84.21 for gaming heh). Each one will be pre-empted with drivercleaner of course.

• Going to try updating BIOS (MSI came out with a new version last month, but I need to plug in a fucken floppy drive to do it... my HTPC has no floppy!).

• Reinstall Sage from the ground up.

• Reinstall all other various drivers I need (in case something got fooked in them somewhere, and they need a refresh).

[IncredibleHat]

GRRR

Welp, I don't know what I did... but now EVERYTHING will come to a complete grinding frozen halt on the computer after like a minute or two of playback. Even Zoomplayer wont even run a DVD now direct from disc!

@#%^$@^&#%!$@!

Friggen 'ell!

... time to reinstall everything ...

[IncredibleHat]

AH! HA! ....

Ok... the issue of this topic "pause 2 seconds then quick catchup" is now gone with the latest 92.91 (also 91.47) installed.

HOWEVER

Those 9x.xx drivers cause ANOTHER bug in Sage to occur, which is why I had wanted to avoid the 9x series, but oh well, I've finally figured a workaround that allows me to have ALL the best of ALL the worlds now.

I posted the findings here:
http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...9&postcount=26

So, in regards to THIS topic, the issue is solved by upgrading to unsupported drivers, but having to live with more issues, and workarounds until frey and nvidia fix these problems (hopefully without causing new ones again).

This Topic Resolved

[Alwayslearnin]

I have this issue as well. Running PureVideo and VMR9. I do not run FSE. I have installed the latest drivers from Nvidia, and I'm running the current version of Sage.

This is relatively new, and I have no idea what I did to make it start happening.

Did anyone have any progress on resolving this?

[IncredibleHat]

Which issue? The pause-speedup one? Or the grid of boxies during playback?

Both are driver related, one existing in old drivers, the other existing in new drivers.

Drivers... grr... evil crap the lot of it!

[Alwayslearnin]

I ran the debugger and came up with the following response:

Thu 9/28 21:22:00.973 VF.submitJob(VFJob[Pause r=0.0 t=0 file=null ifn=null])
Thu 9/28 21:22:00.974 processOptionsMenu optionsMenu=default:null|OptionsMenu:StopPopup
Thu 9/28 21:22:00.975 VF processing job VFJob[Pause r=0.0 t=0 file=null ifn=null] nPlayin=true
Thu 9/28 21:22:00.997 VF processing on UI Thread VFJob[Pause r=0.0 t=0 file=null ifn=null]
Thu 9/28 21:22:00.998 Pausing the playback graph.
Thu 9/28 21:22:01.009 VF.submitJob(VFJob[DirectControl r=0.0 t=0 file=null ifn=null])
Thu 9/28 21:22:01.011 VF processing job VFJob[DirectControl r=0.0 t=0 file=null ifn=null] nPlayin=false
Thu 9/28 21:22:01.013 VF processing on UI Thread VFJob[DirectControl r=0.0 t=0 file=null ifn=null]
Thu 9/28 21:22:01.014 DShowMediaPlayer is consuming the events...
Thu 9/28 21:22:01.014 Event: 0xe
Thu 9/28 21:22:01.014 VF processing job null nPlayin=false
Thu 9/28 21:22:01.015 isRec=false rd=####### base=######
Thu 9/28 21:22:01.015 VF thread is now waiting for 0:00:00.000

For those that can read this, can someone tell me what the previous If then statement means, and maybe there is some obvious fix.