Video Stutter with v6

[Kirby]

What about desktop resolution? Any chance that it could be playing a part? I run at 1920x1080i through the component dongle. But if you run at something less, and the stuttering is mainly on 1080i content, could it be that the purevideo/card is having issues resizing it in real time?

[Narflex]

We're VERY interested in resolving this issue but still have not been able to get enough information from someone with a reproducible case in order to resolve it. The specific issue I'm referring to is those that had stutter-free playback in V5 w/VMR9, but don't have stutter-free playback in V6 w/VMR9.

The main thing we're trying to find out from people that have stuttering in V6 but not in V5 is exactly what version it showed up on. We have not been able to reproduce this problem in house yet, so we can't do those tests ourselves.

[cummings66]

My resolution is 848x480 to the Infocus PJ. I think it started happening with me in the second beta, it may have even been the first beta. At any rate I can reproduce it at will.

I just turn off the option to not drop FSE and then allow another program to take the focus away from Sage. It will stutter until I exit the program. The logs say FSE was dropped and there is never mention of it being enabled again until I exit Sage.

Anytime I've ever seen stutter in the Beta the logs had a corresponding entry saying it dropped FSE and that's the only thing I've seen in common with a few others.

As detailed in my bug reports which others here can't see, I'm running it on a P4 3 Gig CPU, 1 Gig of Ram, 620 Gigs of SATA drives (Seagate), Asus P5P800 motherboard, Nvidia 6600GT video card. Windows MCE with all updates and packs. Nothing is overclocked.

Drivers have varied in an attempt to fix it, but they ranged from very old Nvidia drivers for MCE to the latest release, and the same goes for purevideo as well. Audio drivers for the sound card has been the same throughout, latest version for the HDA Digital X-Mystique card.

This much is certain, when I was using V5 I did not update any drivers, it was all old by the time V6 came about. Seeing others have the same issues and reporting fixes by updating drivers I did so as well, no change resulted. So now I have current drivers but it's not any better or worse. The only thing which has helped is the option to not drop FSE, but as I said sometimes for who knows why it drops anyhow. I have disabled every program running to see if something is amis, no change. I only run AVG and it used to screw things up when it updated by forcing Sage to drop FSE, now at least for the most part it doesn't do that with that flag.

Here's what I'm telling you, FSE support is broken, there has got to be something happening here that you changed from V5 to V6 and it's broken. V5 was rock solid, it never had any of these issues and I never had it say it dropped FSE either. V6 drops FSE at the blink of an eye, at least it used to. Now it's not as common. The bug I think is that Sage does not reenable FSE.

[GTwannabe]

FSE is broken... if I standby my HTPC with FSE enabled, the system hard locks on resume. If I maximize the SageTV video window while a video is playing in FSE mode, the SageTV window quickly crashes and vanishes. This happens on both ATI and nVidia graphics cards, with any video decoder.

[Keenan]

PCIe here as well. I messed around with this today and just gave myself a headache and got angry, shut the thing off and made the sign of a cross with my fingers at it.

Seriously though, I'm considering different frontends such as MythTV, BeyondTV and even MCE, which will have support for the HDHomeRun very soon. I'll lose integrated support for my R5000 setup, but I should be able to play back those recordings somehow with one of the above.

To respond to Narflex's query, I've never been able to get stutter free 1080i with either Sage 5 or Sage 6. 720p works like a champ. I will say the stuttering is worse with 6 though.

Also, using overlay solves the stuttering problem, so I'm guessing it's something with the NVidia?DirectX software? I don't know enough about what all of that stuff does to comment too much about it. Overlay is not an option as the PQ is crap.

Sending 1920x1080i via DVI/HDMI to a DVDO VP50 and then on to a 73" Mits CRT-based RPTV. Have tried 1920x1080p out from the PC to the DVDO as well, but it doesn't make any difference.

[teedublu]

Maybe...

I found my system more responsive when I set the "Regularly rescan import directories" option under Detailed Setup, Customize. (I'm still just SD)

I noticed that after upgrading to v6 from v4, my HD activity was always blinking. So Regularly rescan means "Constantly rescan". This shouldn't have defaulted to a totally new mode of operation. And the option to do this should be configurable intervals, or at least be reasonable, like 15mins so power-management can go to standby etc...

Side Note: I also turned off those "thumbnails", to restore responsiveness to the recordings list -- but had to do that by editing the properties file (that's not nice).

TW

[Keenan]

Done all the above, and in fact, the system is setup currently to do only TV, no music or anything else, no media directories, etc.

I'm wondering if it could be a timing issue between the PC output and the display, but I'm not about to start playing with that as nasty things can happen if you don't know what you're doing.

[Kirby]

Its starting to sound like this issue is branching into 2. Sounds like some of you can get stutter free playback until you do some event (sleep, lose focus) while Ron's issue is from startup it doesnt work on one of his systems. I havent seen Ron's log file to know if his system is dropping FSE immediately on startup, but I suppose its possible?

[Goodspike]

Originally Posted by cummings66

I really hope ALL of you guys are filing bug reports on this. It's a MAJOR issue as I tried to point out to them and they're ignoring it. They had this reported numerous times in Beta and yet they released it without one single attempt made at a fix.

They need to know of the new guys having problems and maybe just maybe they'll get around to fixing it.

As I said before, this V6 should not have been released, it's got some serious bugs in it that should not be there. When a person with a working V5 system installs the V6 program and it now will not playback HD without stutter it's not a driver issue, it's not hardware, it's software. Ask yourself, what changed? Simple answer is Sage changed.

I told sage to not drop FSE and it seems to have helped out a lot, but once in a while I have to exit and restart because it still drops FSE for some reason or another. How do I know that? Simple, I can display windows menus on top of Sage when that should not be possible.

Sage has not returned an email to me since I've reported the bug and the fact that their suggested fix didn't work. Sage changed how V6 deals with FSE and they broke it in the process.

What I did notice is this, it looks like a pattern is forming. I have AGP, as do most others who have stutter. Kirby has PCI-e and I'm wondering...

To each his own I guess, but I used several of the Version 6 betas (I'm still using the last one--haven't updated yet) and don't have an issue with stutter using an AGP card. During the beta I figured out that my long recording stutter was related to the use of Zone Alarm.

The Version 6 betas were the first that allowed me to consistently use FSE. With the prior version betas I could use FSE with roughly every other beta, but not the final release.

[cummings66]

As I see it, there are enough of us having problems with stutter that they should have made more effort towards fixing it rather than releasing something they "knew" many have issues with.

I know they're working on it, but with no feedback from support what are we to think? You would at least like to get a note that says we are aware of the issue and we're working on it, but instead you get zip.

I've turned off rescanning of stuff, if it could be turned off it is. Yet the problem exists. It's interesting that some of those now happy are the same ones who couldn't use FSE before, and those that could can't. I guess we get to share the frustration you had in the past

For me, as I said my problems are minor now that I've enabled the flag to prevent Sage from dropping FSE, and that apparently doesn't help everybody.

Yes, I would say that there are at least 2 different stutter issues in this thread.

What remains is that if it worked in V5 it should work in V6, and for many of us it no longer works correctly.

For the user who has never had it work fine, what graphic card are you using to output 1080i? Mine can't do it either. 720p is the best I can do with the 6600GT and have no stutter. However I output 848x480 to my PJ since that's it's native resolution and it's easier on the card.

[Keenan]

I've never had it work right and I'm using a 7600GT w/256mb. I've even OC'ed the card and it doesn't help. Turned off write caching on the HDD, changed some flags in the properties file, all sort of stuff, yet I still get the stutter on 1080i. Tried older Nvidia drivers, the newest drivers, PureVideo, played with audio decoders, recording drive is partitioned and used only for recordings, etc...no love.

I even sent 1080p out from the card thinking that a progressive signal may help as 720p works perfect, no go, still have stuttering.

I saw in another thread where the latest ver 6 has some sort of improvement for .ts streams so I'll probably DL it and try it, although I'm not holding my breath.

[cummings66]

Can you play it back ok in WMP.

[Taddeusz]

I was getting the stuttering issue and in fact just installed a 7600GS that I had ordered to try and solve the issue to replace a 6200LE. Alas, I was still getting the stuttering. I came across this thread.

I'm running SD. I thought I should note that what seems to be causing my problem is that I noticed that in the PureVideo properties the "Video Format" switches between "Full Frame Video" and "Full Frame Film." The switch between the two appears to be what causes the stutter. Not all of the video does it either. The only recordings that I've had this happen on regularly are Alias episodes recorded off TNT. Everything else seems to play fine except I do notice some video lag occasionally.

Switching the deinterlacing from Smart to Automatic seemed to fix the issue but I wonder if there is another way to solve it? I'll try stepping the drivers back to see if that fixes it.

[Keenan]

Originally Posted by cummings66

Can you play it back ok in WMP.

I used WMP a few times and it plays back ok, I usually try VLC and it works fine there.

I just installed V6.0.19 from the following link, and I don't want to get my hopes up just yet, but I'm currently getting good playback while using my little 17" LCD monitor. I have VMR9 enabled with FSE on, and so far, no stuttering. Just watched some HD hockey and no stuttering. I'm leaving it running for awhile, and then I'm going to switch the output to my 73" display and see what happens, but in the past, if it stutters, I would see it on the LCD as well.


http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22348
SageTV V6.0.19 Released - SageTV Community

[gateslinger]

Stuttering using an AGP 6600GT, purevideo. Could not get it to go away. V5 doesn't stutter as much if FSE is enabled.

[Ron]

I may be on to something, but not exactly sure where this may be headed. I played a recording that exhibited stuttering using graphedit. The graph shows that the clip is going to the Nividia Transport Demux, then the Nvidia Video Decoder and out to the renderer. The clip had stutter. At Kirby's suggestion, I inserted the Sage TV MpegDecoder before the Nvidia Transport Demux, from the Pass Through pin, and stutter seemed to go away when playing back via Graphedit.

So the question, for those that understand this stuff better than I do is, how can we tell what filters are being used in Sage? If the graph is correct, the Sage MpegDemux is not being used.

[Goodspike]

Those of you with stuttering, check your CPU utilization when it's occurring. That's what helped me narrow it down to Zonealarm. If you're running at 80% utilization, you're going to have stuttering.

[salsbst]

Originally Posted by Goodspike

Those of you with stuttering, check your CPU utilization when it's occurring. That's what helped me narrow it down to Zonealarm. If you're running at 80% utilization, you're going to have stuttering.

The type of stuttering one might see with CPU utilization around 80% is sporadic.

What v6 introduced for my one client isn't sporadic, it's constant, as if some part of the demuxing/decoding/rendering process is experiencing hiccoughs.

[Ron]

Originally Posted by Goodspike

Those of you with stuttering, check your CPU utilization when it's occurring. That's what helped me narrow it down to Zonealarm. If you're running at 80% utilization, you're going to have stuttering.

I don't use Zonealarm, CPU utilization is no higher than 10%, and it still stutters.

[matrix35]

well i'm getting around 45% cpu utilization for SD and I'm stuttering from time to time. I've noticed that if I'm in FSE its worse. I've also removed nvidia audio as my audio renderer. hope this helps.

not wanting to hijack this thread but.. i do have something odd in my setup, why is my CPU at 45% when using the purevideo decoder while with Intervideo nonCSS video decoder i'm at 25% am i doing something wrong?

thanks.