Stuttering LiveTV about every 15 to 20sec.

[cmf]

Hello,

SAGETV works basically fine on my setup instead of some stuttering issues.

Both, server and client are based on VISTA, I face the problem that LiveTV is working, but every 10 top 20 sec TV-picture stops for few parts of a second and continues then to repeat this stuttering once again after 10 to 20 sec. During stuttering audio continues without any delay or interruption.

This happens on my client as well as on my server.
I have already used several decoders (original SAGE, ATI) but no change.
The time between stuttering is different but in most cases about 15 to 20 secs.

Does anybody could give me a hint how to locate this failure?
My hardware should be fine because on my former SW (MEDIAPORTAL) i didn´t have such problems (but enough other one.... ;-) )

thanks for your support,
Christian

[Opus4]

One thing to check for stuttering is whether the recording drive has been formatted using 64K clusters.

- Andy

[derringer]

I have actually fought this problem for a while now, and I will tell you a few things to troubleshoot to get a clearer idea of what is causing it:

1.) Ensure that the actual *playback* also skips in the same spots. If it does, then you can rule out the video card/video drivers/etc. In my case, it skips in exactly the same spots.

2.) Check for cluster size on the recording drive.

3.) Check motherboard/IDE/SATA/any HDD drivers are up-to-date or without problems.

If all of these check out, the next thing to do (which is the step I am at,) is to start suspecting hardware. While I know you said you believe the hardware is fine, this really is the next step in the process. I am going to be undertaking this this week, and hope to be able to report back some positive results or some info to possibly help you out, but here is what I intend to do:

a.) Change locations (physical locations on the board) and/or IRQ assignments (in BIOS) for the cards I have in the unit (2 Happauge tuner cards, 1 GeForce 8600gts.) If moving them around, and then getting them to work again still shows the issue, I will start removing single cards for testing (i.e. physically removing one of the 2 tuners, and seeing if that clears it up.)

My *theory* is that it is an IRQ sharing or driver issue with the motherboard which causes a slight pause every so often with the stream being written to disk. I have tried almost everything else, including every codec available (both audio and video,) all setting tweaks, and have even done several reinstalls, to no avail. Once you exhaust all the other options, the fact that there is a possible non-fatal, but reoccuring conflict on your hardware is the next place to look, in my opinion.

Let me know how your search goes, and I will do the same, but this is my current plan to troubleshoot. It might be helpful if you give some more hardware details, so that those of us experiencing this can compare, as well.

[kevine]

I too have similar problems. More annoying than anything else. Mine occurs on specific channels. Usually the ones on 1080i format. 720p have no problems. So, ABC is usually a culprit.

I pass tests 1 and 2 and I agree with your steps (ie: it happens in the same exact spots when playing in VLC and WMP outside of Sage) Hey at least this means I do not have a decoder problem.

Here is where I disagree with your next steps.
First, I do not like upgrading drivers when my setup is working. Yes, not working like I wish but working. If I upgrade my drivers, I NEED to be able to get back to old spot within an hour or WAF plumets.

Would it not be less evasive to test live TV from the same source? (BTW, Have not done this yet) For example, my next step would be to watch a program on my HDHR from VLC. If the live program stutters during live tv, I would check network traffic (since this is an HDHR) and signal issues. And since, it occurs on 1080i for my situation, it is more than likely not drivers or IRQs. However, if LiveTV does not stutter, I would expect a disk or SageTV itself issue. Since I have 64K clusters, I would submit a trouble ticket.

However, if none of this pans out, I will then move to drivers and IRQs.

After that, I start spending money:
1. Drive for each tuner. I have 4 physical drives. So I would lower # of tuners down to 4 from 9 just to test. If it fixes the problem, bring them back on line 1 at a time, add drives as appropriate.

2. Make my server headless, buy a HD extender. ( I may do this anyway but just cash poor right now)

BTW: I have
Java 1.6
Sage 6.3.8 RC
Rest in sig

[carlgar]

Originally Posted by cmf

Hello,
Both, server and client are based on VISTA, I face the problem that LiveTV is working, but every 10 top 20 sec TV-picture stops for few parts of a second and continues then to repeat this stuttering once again after 10 to 20 sec. During stuttering audio continues without any delay or interruption.

Have you turned off superfetch? It caused this type of problem for me. Superfetch is trying to read the file into menory.

[cmf]

Hello again,

first of all, many thanks for your suggestions! - It is already fine to hear to be not alone, setting up SAGETV.

My HDD was already formatted in 64k clusters, so that was not the reason for stuttering.

This morning I removed SPEEDFAN (measuring tool to show inside temparute of my components) from my active background - programs and I am happy to say that stuttering immediately disapppeared.!!

I test now for few yours several channels but no stuttering anymore.

It (hopefully) seems that I found my "bug".

Perhaps it could help anybody else out there....

once again, thanks to all for your quick and detailed support.

br, Christian

[kevine]

Great. Glad to hear it.

However, I do not have speedfan. My search continues.

[DaveWC]

I'm having problems with choppy video & audio with live TV as well. I disabled SuperFetch and that had no effect. Just now I went to Services, found "Windows Search" and stopped that process. My live video/audio is immediately better. Time will tell if this is the answer but you might give it a shot.

[jstockton]

I have done everything in this thread including disabling Superfetch and Windows Search and still have stuttering in HD.

Here is some info on my system:

• Vista Ultimate
• Sage 6.3
• SageMC16x9 6.3.7a
• iTV as of 1-20-08
• 2 - Hapauge 1800 pcie
• 2 gig ram
• 2.6 ghz dual core

I have a partition created separate from my OS partition formatted at 64k for my data drive (recordings, music...), disabled quite a lot of unneeded services, tried just about all variations of overlay, VMR9 jib jab and still have stutter. I am a newly converted MCE user and really like the possibilities with SageTV if I can just get this stutter eliminated.

If anyone has any suggestions on what else to try, I would appreciate it. I think I have exhausted the other threads so I find myself coming to the group.

Thanks!

[carlgar]

1.2 Ghz dual core may be just a shade underpowered, but not sure. You should use the resource monitor to see where the bottle neck is. I suspect there may be multiple accesses to the file. See this thread for more infomation http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthr...88&postcount=1. If the CPU usage is 100% then it is underpowered.

[jstockton]

Originally Posted by carlgar

1.2 Ghz dual core may be just a shade underpowered

Sorry, I'm not sure where I got the 1.2 from, it's actually a 2.6 dual core. In any case, I followed the link you provided and watched perf mon. My CPU hits only about 50% utilization and Sage takes up about 40% of that. I checked out the I/O and only one process is writing to the the program that I am watching at the time of stuttering. I don't have much HD content to watch in the morning so I will have to confirm the CPU metrics tonight when there is HD to watch, but I started to notice the stuttering with SD and the CPU wasn't maxed out.

[carlgar]

You should also look at the numer of reads to the file. It is unlikely a CPU issue. You should not see any studdering with SD. Do you have any other options for watching, such as client or extender? If so do they show a problem?

[Doubletop]

Its interesting to read that so many people now have an issue with stuttering (I do) and the approach appears to be looking into hardware problems. However a quick search on the forum for "Stutter" comes up with 12 pages of posts on the subject the oldest being http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21011
which just happens to be the SageTV V6.0.13 Beta release note. Dated 10/31/2006.

Are we all looking for the wrong culprit, and its really V6?

[jstockton]

Originally Posted by carlgar

You should also look at the numer of reads to the file. It is unlikely a CPU issue. You should not see any studdering with SD. Do you have any other options for watching, such as client or extender? If so do they show a problem?

I haven't been able to look at the number of reads to the file yet, but last night I broke down and purchased license keys for STV and Placeshifter. I did experience stuttering with the client, but not as much and I'm not sure if thats because my HTPC (Sage Server) is hooked up via wireless N. I could run a cable down to the HTPC temporarily to see how it looks if that might help point me/someone in the right direction.

[jstockton]

Originally Posted by Doubletop

Its interesting to read that so many people now have an issue with stuttering (I do) and the approach appears to be looking into hardware problems. However a quick search on the forum for "Stutter" comes up with 12 pages of posts on the subject the oldest being http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21011
which just happens to be the SageTV V6.0.13 Beta release note. Dated 10/31/2006.

Are we all looking for the wrong culprit, and its really V6?

By V6 do you mean Java 6?

I guess I hadn't considered looking that far back for a resolution. Even if I had, I'm not sure that I would understand what was being talked about in that thread. I'll admit that I jumped into Sage after having MCE setup for less than a month and probably should have taken the time to understand what the options at least mean. I just got overly excited!

[jstockton]

I've made some significant progress! It appears that while trying to change all the settings, I change the decoder to be Sage and my 1800 tuner cards actually have decoding built in so I changed it back to the hardware decoding and there is a significant improvement. Now I don't have stuttering, the playback isn't very smooth. Now it's jittery I have also noticed that if I am doing anything that has disk I/O, the stuttering comes back. I must be on a fine line to good and bad playback. I have a wireless N adapter for my network access and was copying a ripped DVD to my HTPC and right away the stuttering came back.


Any other suggestions?

[Doubletop]

Originally Posted by jstockton

By V6 do you mean Java 6?

No SageTV V6.x.x; The observations on stuttering first started when V6.0.13 was introduced . SageTV V2 through V5 don't have a single post on the subject (but don't think about going back).

[zzmystique]

Hi

I had the stuttering problem with a technotrends S1400 and hauppauge HVR4000.

I changed the Video / Audio - MPEG Video decoder filter from Cyberlink to SageTV MPeg Video decoder and Video / Audio - MPeg Audio decoder filter from Cyberlink to MPeg Audio decoder.

This seems to have resolved the issue for me.

Anne

[stryker]

I had some stuttering start on some channels recently. Seems for reasons unknown the tv signal is now a little weak and I need a signal amp.

[RobJ]

Originally Posted by Doubletop

Its interesting to read that so many people now have an issue with stuttering (I do) and the approach appears to be looking into hardware problems. However a quick search on the forum for "Stutter" comes up with 12 pages of posts on the subject the oldest being http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21011
which just happens to be the SageTV V6.0.13 Beta release note. Dated 10/31/2006.

Are we all looking for the wrong culprit, and its really V6?

No SageTV V6.x.x; The observations on stuttering first started when V6.0.13 was introduced . SageTV V2 through V5 don't have a single post on the subject (but don't think about going back).

After reading these, I was a bit too incredulous to respond, and then thought you would get plenty of responses from other old-timers pretty quickly. But apparently not... I have very little idea why your search was so misleading. Is it possible that the option to limit searching to only the recent year or two was in effect? I don't trust the SageTV forum search from my poor experiences with it, I prefer the Google site search. Also, stutter is sometimes referred to as studder, or jerky playback, or not 'smooth playback'.

I can personally testify that stutter in the old days was as bad or worse. And it was an early v6 beta (around the one you mention) that first cleared it up for me and probably many others. For some of us, most of the stutter reports ended around then, and only seem to be understandably resurging now due to more people attempting HD playback.

What is stutter? A series of frames delayed enough to cause your eye to notice that playback is not smooth. There are many causes of stutter, and correspondingly many fixes. Any time you get smooth playback of audio or video, you can be sure that there has been a lot of hard work, testing, and time put in, finding the right combination of programs, codecs, filters, formats, clean data, and sufficiently powerful hardware to produce that smooth playback. And any time you have new formats, codecs, and hardware, you can assume there will be stutter problems for awhile. It takes a lot of work to push a frame on time, data must be read, demuxed, decoded, transcoded, filtered, transferred between tools, transferred to the video card, processed more, and finally transferred to a screen, all at precisely 24, 30, or 60 times a second. If the CPU or other resource happens to be busy with something else, because an antivirus or other security tool feels the need to scan something, or any number of programs decide it is important for them to manage their memory or do something else right that moment, then frames are delayed.

If you can get a search to work properly, you should be able to find a thread referring to the '16 second stutter' (or studder?) problem, possibly related to the topic of this thread. Using Task Manager and similar, I was able to determine that earlier versions of SageTV had a CPU-intensive process that kicked off with a 15 second timer. On an older and slower computer such as mine, the process could take a half to one and a half seconds, and the 15 second timer would be set from then. That created moments of stutter that appeared to be every 16 seconds. With an early v6 beta, it appeared to me that SageTV was able to optimize that repeated task, perhaps by eliminating part of it, optimizing parts of it, and by breaking it up into smaller staggered parts. There will always be a need to run things in the background, but if you only run little bits at a time, then there will not be a visible impact.

With the advent of HD, much more data has to be manipulated in the same time frames, and new formats and codecs and tools have to be tested and proven. That requires faster hardware, and time to work out the problems. As part of the process, I'm sure that Sage will continue to do what they can.

(Sorry for the length of this. And I mean no dis-respect to you Doubletop, I don't trust the SageTV forum search.)