Stuttering gone on HD Playback. Why?

[jal]

Late last night I got the MVP working (wired connection) and I had a few minutes, before my sister came home (the MVP is for her) to try it out. Seemed to me as though the stuttering was gone on the HD playback.


I had given up on this issue after doing some test runs on the Mvp in my own room. Frustrated with it, I decided to go ahead and install it my sister's room - only to run into another disappointment. When I turned it on, it stuck on the "Contacting Servers" screen.

I went back to the forum and found a thread whose participants claimed that SageTv handles IP addressed poorly for Mvps. As I am not a techie, the discussion of IP addrsses was WAY over my head. Anyway I took a wild guess as to what they were saying. They seemed to be saying that I needed to go to the server, double-click the network card in Network Connections in the Control Panel to see the IP address (in my case 192.168.10.2) and then open up the Sage Properties file and set the following value (hope I'm spelling this right)
miniserver/forced_IP_Addr = 192.168.10.2
(You must have sage closed for this value to stick, as I recall).


Then I went back to the Mvp. Since it was working now, I decided to try a couple of HD playbacks before my sister came back into the room (she was ready to go to bed so I didn't have much time). Guess what? No stuttering! (Maybe this was a fluke, I need to do more testing when I get home from work).


If stuttering is in part IP related (I realize this is unlikely), maybe this is why Frey technologies couldn't seem to reproduce the problem in their labs? Who would have thought to look there for the problem?



I also had a stuttering problem on my Placeshifter PC - but I fixed that earlier in the day by purchasing a $149.99 BFG Agp 8x 7300 GT video card at CompUsa.


I'm at work right now so I can't tell you my exact setup. I definitely have SageTV Decoder selected and I seem to recall I was using Overlay on that last test run. (I can't recall for sure because I was also doing some test runs with the FSE-Vmr9 combo).


The server is an Abit NF8 Athlon 2800+ 1Gig Ram, Maxtor ATA/IDE 7200 Rpm drive.

[Humanzee]

The MVP isn't HD capable. So the HD video files if you are capturing them with a QAM tuner or Firewire or what ever on your server need to be transcoded on the server and then sent to the MVP, placeshifter client. etc. So if you have good recordings and its skipping it maybe that you don't have enough CPU in the server to do this transcoding, especially if commercial detection or some other cpu intensive process is running. If HDTV is skipping on the Server or on a sagetv client, its likely a video card issue, because the files are played in their native format. Of course anything can skip if its a bad recording.

I think, I don't have an mvp.

[jal]

Sorry guys, I jumped the gun.

I did some more testing when i got home from work. The MVP is still stuttering on HD playback. I guess I'm going to just live with it.


The server PC and the PlaceShifter PC do not stutter.