HD-PVR - Jerky playback on in-house client

[planetix]

This is driving me a bit nuts. Here's my setup.

HD-PVR rev D2 using the release .5.3 drivers. I'm using the Sage 6.5.11 beta after first trying the release. I have my media PC upstairs, an AMD 4850e dualcore rig on a Gigabyte 780g board, 4gb ram, one 640gb SATA drive, wrapped in an Antec Fusion 430 case. Instead of using the onboard video I'm using an ATI 4830 video card, Catalyst 9.1 drivers.

I have the Vista Codec pack and CoreAVC 1.9 installed.

Sage works ok on this setup. Channels get tuned, video looks clear and smooth, no frames skipping. I'm sure it could use some further tweaking but so far, so good.

The problem is on my downstairs box. I have a second media center, same specs as the one above except with that one I am using the built in AMD 3200 instead of a discreet video card. I am using the Sage TV client 6.5.11 beta (tried the release too). I have it hard-wired through the walls (from a previous install) to my gigabit switch upstairs which is what my media center is plugged in to up there.

On the downstairs box running the client I get sever stuttering/video frame loss - audio is fine, but the video is about unwatchable. I've tried everything I can think of:

I installed the client on my main gaming rig thinking maybe it was the video card. My main rig has an AMD 4870 1gb setup and it has the exact same problem.

I tried it on my wife's PC which has an Nvidia 9400. Same problem.

I read the survival guide and went through the recommended patches. I upped my JVM memory to 512, then 1024, in the registry. I made sure my Eset Nod32 AV software exempted the recording directories from scanning. No matter what I do, watching live TV on any PC but the upstairs one, the one the HD-PVR is connected to, is a disaster. This is a problem because being able to watch Live TV on my downstairs TV as well as upstairs is the whole reason I went with Sage.

Surely I must be missing something? There appear to be a ton of settings, registry tweaks, and other tips scattered about the forums and I've tried to go through them all but it's been a lot of work so far and still the same problems. What should I be trying here? This is driving me a little crazy. Could it be network related? Even though I'm hardwired via gigabit maybe my throughput isn't what it should be?

[phelme]

It's probably a codec problem, either merit or maybe misconfigured in Sage. There is nothing wrong with the HD3200, I have one in my server (part of the 780g chipset) and it plays back everything just fine with little CPU hammering.

First thing to do is try playing back your HD-PVR transport stream files OUTSIDE of SageTV so you get all your codecs and stuff in order. Pick up a copy of Media Player Classic (I like the Home Cinema flavor, but any will do) to test playback. MPC is great because it's easy to change which external DirectShow filters are used and then you can change the merit's of the decoders to tell Windows which should be the default.

mount your server's recording hard drive over the network from your client and play back one of your files with MPC and see if it works correctly. then depending on what happens, we'll go from there.

Oh one thing, you did install the ArcSoft decoders (or some equivalent) for H.264 playback on your client, right?

[planetix]

I appreciate your reply, but I gave up on SageTV a while back.

The HD-PVR works fine outside of SageTV. In fact, it works fine in MediaPortal, albit with a lot of testing/tweaking, but Mediaportal is also free and open source. And, in my opinion, better than SageTV.

I wrote support a while ago on this but never heard back so moved on. Thanks for the ideas though.