Smooth HD playback?

[Muchacho]

Unfortunately I am still unable to get smooth HD playback and am hoping that someone may have some new ideas!

I am running XP on an AMD64 3200+, asus a8n32-sli-deluxe (nforce 4) MB, 2G ram, and a 8600GT with the 163.71 drivers. I use nvidia purevideo and powerDVD (2911) as decoders and VMR9 (+FSE) outputting 720p. It seems that I have to click inverse telecine in order to get powerDVD to work. I use ffdshow for audio decoding. I am recording QAM from a HDHR.

Using the powerDVD I am able to get decent playback, with an occasional stutter (i.e. scrolling text is not smooth every 30s or so) on almost everything except for shows that are recorded from ABC (WTAE where I live). The ABC shows have serious stutter and are pretty much unwatchable. Oddly enough, it actually seems to work fine when watching live TV though… Using the nvidia decoders, the ABC shows work, but some FOX shows have serious stutter and everything is not as smooth as with powerDVD. I could live with powerDVD if it could play the stuff from ABC- which is a problem seeing as my wife watches grey anatomy and such and it drives her nuts to have to change the decoder…

Does anyone have any suggestions and ideas that may help?

[morfinx]

Are you trying to play 1080i/p contents? If so, your CPU may be a tad underpowered. I had a A64 3000+ that was overclocked to 2.4Ghz, and it would play 1080p videos smoothly ONLY with GPU assisted hardware acceleration (using PowerDVD's decoder). When trying to play the same videos without hardware acceleration, it would stutter and choke.

Try playing some of your recordings with Sage in windowed mode and have the Task Manager running and see what is your CPU usage during playback. Let us know.

[Muchacho]

Originally Posted by morfinx

Try playing some of your recordings with Sage in windowed mode and have the Task Manager running and see what is your CPU usage during playback. Let us know.

I believe that I am using HA. Typically the CPU is around 20-30% Do you think I should try to OC a bit. I have tried OCing the GPU to no avail...

Thanks

[GTwannabe]

Your CPU is fine for 1080i since you have an 8600GT.

My experience with the GeForce 8 series has been that the XP drivers are crap for HD playback. Inverse Telecine doesn't work correctly under XP... if you run FRAPS you can see what I mean. NBC-DT is broadcast at 1080i @ 30fps. The XP driver's IVTC setting creates an unwatchable 15fps slideshow. I also had issues with every video played in Sage stuttering after resuming from Standby.

I ditched XP for Vista Business and now every SageTV video is as smooth as glass and is de-interlaced and frame doubled to a rock-solid 60fps. Note that you need to enable the Aero desktop for smooth video playback without FSE, so you need Vista Home Premium, Business, or Ultimate.

[Muchacho]

Originally Posted by GTwannabe

Your CPU is fine for 1080i since you have an 8600GT.

My experience with the GeForce 8 series has been that the XP drivers are crap for HD playback. Inverse Telecine doesn't work correctly under XP... if you run FRAPS you can see what I mean. NBC-DT is broadcast at 1080i @ 30fps. The XP driver's IVTC setting creates an unwatchable 15fps slideshow. I also has issues with every video played in Sage stuttering after resuming from Standby.

I ditched XP for Vista Business and now every SageTV video is as smooth as glass and is de-interlaced and frame doubled to a rock-solid 60fps. Note that you need to enable the Aero desktop for smooth video playback without FSE, so you need Vista Home Premium, Business, or Ultimate.

Thanks- What a pain this has all been... I hate to have to reinstall everything again and have to buy a new OS to get this to work. Especially with the HD extenders comming. Maybe I will go back to my old 6600GT- even though that never did the trick for me in the past...

[dcardellini]

Not that it matters, but I have just posted on another thread a discovery as to why my 6600GT stutters AFTER resume from standby. It IS an nVidia driver bug (for XP?). However, I would be shocked to learn that it also affects the 8600GT.

Download the nVidia nTune Performance Application for free from nVidia and monitor your GPU speed.

With the 6600GT and "current" driver, a fresh boot shows the clock at 300 mhz. Run a video, and it steps up to 500 mhz and stays there indefinitely.

Go to standby, then resume. The clock will be at 300 mhz, and WILL remain there ....it will not step up to 500 mhz.

You can change the clock speed from this nVidia utility. After a fresh boot, play a video (pushing clock to 500 mhz). Manually pull it back down to 300 mhz using the utility. You should see same exact stutter symptoms.

However, once I resumed from standby, I am unable to use the utility to re-force the GPU back up to 500 mhz. My solution with the 6600GT was to use a very old driver (81.98). Doubt that option exists with the 8600GT.

The problem is so repeatable and "observable" (not subjective video quality, but a number in nVidia nTune) that I imagine this is very fixable by nVidia.

Curious if 8600GT has same exact issue?????

[Muchacho]

Originally Posted by GTwannabe

Your CPU is fine for 1080i since you have an 8600GT.

My experience with the GeForce 8 series has been that the XP drivers are crap for HD playback. Inverse Telecine doesn't work correctly under XP... if you run FRAPS you can see what I mean. NBC-DT is broadcast at 1080i @ 30fps. The XP driver's IVTC setting creates an unwatchable 15fps slideshow. I also had issues with every video played in Sage stuttering after resuming from Standby.

I ditched XP for Vista Business and now every SageTV video is as smooth as glass and is de-interlaced and frame doubled to a rock-solid 60fps. Note that you need to enable the Aero desktop for smooth video playback without FSE, so you need Vista Home Premium, Business, or Ultimate.

Do you think that my rig (listed in the first post) will be enough to run Vista home premium? I can get a copy of that for free, so I may give it a go. Do I need to do anything other than install the latest nvidia MB and video drivers during the install?

Thanks for your suggestion, I would love to get good video playback and put this all behind me.

[Djc208]

Originally Posted by Muchacho

Do you think that my rig (listed in the first post) will be enough to run Vista home premium? I can get a copy of that for free, so I may give it a go. Do I need to do anything other than install the latest nvidia MB and video drivers during the install?

Thanks for your suggestion, I would love to get good video playback and put this all behind me.

I'm thinking it's a software issue, my 3200+ and Gforce 6200LE with 512 MB of RAM will play back most HD video fine (except for it freezing periodically but thats a driver issue). Have you tried shutting off your anti-virus and see if that helps? What about other running software. How is playback in Windows Media Player?

As for running Vista, you shouldn't have any problems. 2 GB is the recommended RAM for VISTA and the 8600 is DX10 capable. The CPU might not be the fastest but it should be more than enough for Vista.

Let us know what you find.

[GTwannabe]

Originally Posted by Muchacho

Do you think that my rig (listed in the first post) will be enough to run Vista home premium? I can get a copy of that for free, so I may give it a go. Do I need to do anything other than install the latest nvidia MB and video drivers during the install?

Thanks for your suggestion, I would love to get good video playback and put this all behind me.

Your rig should be fine for Vista. It's a RAM pig, so 2GB is the minimum unless you disable Superfetch and some other services.

Vista should have default drivers for your motherboard, but there are probably newer ones on nVidia.com or via Windows Update. I would manually download the video drivers so you get the current ones with HD post processing and additional decoding offload.

[Muchacho]

Thanks for the suggestions-

I am not running anti-virus as all the HTPC does is well HTPC... So there are not many background tasks.

The recorded HDTV does not play well in windows media player either. It makes it difficult to determine whether the problem is the playback or the file...

I will let you know how the vista thing goes. I did an install and got terrible playback, but I have not had time to try to troubleshoot.

Thanks for the help- I hope the upcomming HD extender make this conversation obsolete!

[Djc208]

Try running audio and video processing through the same program (either purevideo or ffdshow), I had issues with mine with two codecs trying to work together.

If not I'd say it may be an issue with the video card drivers. The nVidia driver's have been giving me issues with playback on my machine, and then your video card is a lot newer so there's even more possibility of bugs. Especially with all the new video processing hardware built into the card.

I also wonder what would happen if you tried to play back a recorded video on another machine with a different card? Since live TV plays OK there could be some issue with the recording that's not there when watching the live feed.