Live TV Stutter

[GStiles]

I'm seeing video stutter issues, but only with live TV.

I have just built a new SageTV machine running 6.2.10 and migrated all my old recordings over. The recordings look fine, but the live TV is choppy, garbled and stutters badly.

The live TV is via a coax cable from my DTV STB. This is the same setup I used in my old machine. I was running an earlier version of SageTV and did not see this problem, but now after my install and migration I do.

The PC is a Q6600 3Ghz, 8800 GTS card w/640MB, 4GB RAM, Vista 64, PVR-150 MCE -- I don't see a hardware issue here.

This does not seem like some of the other "stutter" posts as it only applies to the live TV feed. Any suggestions on where to look to troubleshoot?

Perhaps look at the Hauppauge drivers for my PVR card?

Thanks in advance.

George

[MeInMaui]

Originally Posted by GStiles

I'm seeing video stutter issues, but only with live TV.

I have just built a new SageTV machine running 6.2.10 and migrated all my old recordings over. The recordings look fine, but the live TV is choppy, garbled and stutters badly.

The live TV is via a coax cable from my DTV STB. This is the same setup I used in my old machine. I was running an earlier version of SageTV and did not see this problem, but now after my install and migration I do.

The PC is a Q6600 3Ghz, 8800 GTS card w/640MB, 4GB RAM, Vista 64, PVR-150 MCE -- I don't see a hardware issue here.

This does not seem like some of the other "stutter" posts as it only applies to the live TV feed. Any suggestions on where to look to troubleshoot?

Perhaps look at the Hauppauge drivers for my PVR card?

Thanks in advance.

George

If you time shift by a few seconds (skip back a few times) does the stutter go away? If so, you might want to try playing with this property:

videoframe/local_encode_to_playback_delay=

It defaults to zero and the value is in milliseconds. Adjusting it to something like 1000 could help.

It might be worth a shot.

Aloha,
Mike

P.S. I would also recommend using the s-video connection between your STB and your PVR150. You will get much better picture quality.

[GStiles]

I'll try the playback delay, but skipping backwards doesn't seem to help. It reminds me of when DirecTV starts having issues during a heavy rainstorm; playback is very pixelated and stops/starts frequently.

[Opus4]

The recording drive is partitioned using 64K clusters?

- Andy

[GStiles]

Originally Posted by Opus4

The recording drive is partitioned using 64K clusters?

- Andy

I bet that is the issue. The drive formatted as NTFS when I installed Vista, but I did not setup a separate area with 64K clusters.

So here's the question. I can use Vista to shrink my existing partition (entire drive) and carve out a separate one that I can format with 64K clusters. This is a SATA II drive.

Or I can point it to an older ATA-100 drive on the same system. For recording and playback am I going to see much difference using this older and slower drive?


EDIT: I tried making the the sole recording directory point to the ATA-100 drive w/64K clusters on my machine. The stutters are still there.

Thanks

George

[davephan]

It sounds like your ports are probably open between your server and MVP (I assume you are using an MVP), since the stuttering only occurs on live TV.

You must be overclocking the Q6600 to be running it faster than 2.4 gig.


Dave

[GStiles]

Originally Posted by davephan

It sounds like your ports are probably open between your server and MVP (I assume you are using an MVP), since the stuttering only occurs on live TV.

You must be overclocking the Q6600 to be running it faster than 2.4 gig.


Dave

No MVP. I have a very basic setup. Just the one machine running SageTV 6.2.10, single PVR-150MCE card, coax in and serial control cable to the DirecTV STB. I am viewing the videos on my PC monitor.

Yes, I did overclock my CPU. Just a modest overclock from 266*9 (default) to 333*9.


UPDATE:

For some reason things seem to be working for a while right after I reboot. For whatever reason, when I use the setup wizard to configure my video, all the options (standard, medium, advanced) cause the stutter. I found that if I manually configure the options VRM9, etc, etc. I get no stutter. So problem is partly solved. I'll have to experiment to see exactly what triggers the stuttering of the video.

Any other suggestions on things to look at?

[GStiles]

After some research I found several folks on the web with my same problem. It appears that Hauppauge has a bug in their 150/350/500 drivers for the PVR series cards. This bug affects how the cards utilize 4GB of RAM. With 3GB or less there is no issue, but with 4 its something about how the card uses the memory and maps it while viewing live tv.

For now there is no fix. There are some active discussion threads under Windows MCE where folks have been working with Hauppauge tech support, but the ultimate solution (new drivers) has not yet been posted.

Just thought I would close out this thread and provide some potential information to others.

[crasch]

When running the client (non Placeshifting version), I found the process SageTranscoder running in the background. When I end that process, the video stops studering. Why would the transcoder be running on on the client. I'm not converting any video, and I'm not running the placeshifter client. Why would the sage transcoder be running?

[Opus4]

SageTVTranscoder.exe is a utility used for more than just transcoding video, such as creating thumbnails for videos. If SageTVTranscoder is running nonstop, using lots of cpu, then you may have a recording or some other file that either is corrupt or in a format that the transcoder has trouble with. I haven't had to look for such a file, so I'm not sure of the best way to find it... the debug log may have info about the last file it tried to use the transcoder on, or you would have to do a process of elimination trying to find which file it has trouble with. (If you highlight a recording & a thumbnial never shows up, that could be a candidate for a problem file.)

- Andy

[GStiles]

I believe that my issue is attributed to a driver problem with the Hauppauge card (and the fact it does not like 4GB of memory in Vista64).

From what I've read there is a lot of banter back and forth between Hauppauge and Microsoft as to who is at fault. Some are saying that Vista SP1 will correct the issue, but I'm not going to install that until it is past the beta stages.

In the interim I have used the MSConfig utility to set my boot memory to 3.2 GB (3277 KB). This corrects all the problems, but I do sacrifice 800K of memory. I will run this solution until SP1 comes out (officially) or until I purchase a new non-Hauppauge tuner card.

[GStiles]

UPDATE: The fix below worked for a while, but the stutter and green screen problems have returned.


I found a solution.

MS has published a hotfix (KB 940105) to address problems with memory addressing in graphics adapters. I happened upon this fix when I recently downloaded a game demo of Crysis and was prompted to install the fix.

Now I am able to watch live TV with no green screen and no stutter running Vista64/4GB RAM and a Hauppauge card.

George

[vinisz]

I can confirm that this problem is also solved in windows vista service pack 1.
I'm currently running sagetv 6.3 with windows vista sp1 beta, 4 GB memory and a hauppage mce500.
No problems at all, anymore...
Even the 3 extenders i'm using work excellent on vista sp1