How to enable hardware acceleration on Nvidia Ion based PC?

[ptzink]

I wanted to revive this thread and perhaps derail it a bit in the process. I have been struggling to get perfect video with my Aspire Revo 3610 client for the last 9 months. My video (mpeg2 and VOB) has always been acceptable (my wife thinks it's fine), but I always notice skips/dropped frames every so often. Sometimes the dropped frames are every couple minutes, sometimes it seems it goes 10 minutes without a dropped frame. But there always seemed to be several skips with in the span of a regular show/movie. The audio has always been fine no matter what decoder I use. Here are my video settings:
- Video Renderer = EVR
- MPEG-2/H.264/DVD Video Decoder = Microsoft DTV-DVD Video Decoder
- 3D Acceleration = Enabled
- Use FSE Mode = Enabled
I have ruled out any issues being on the server side because I have an HD300 extender that plays everything smooth as silk. So I started to look at settings outside of Sage that may improve the dropped frames that I was having. And I think I may have found a setting that greatly reduces if not eliminates the dropped frames. In the Nvidia control panel under "Adjust video image settings" I unchecked the "Use Inverse Telecine" box which is checked by default. This seems counter intuitive to me since this setting is supposed to IMPROVE 1080i and DVD playback, but unchecking this box seemed to improve my dropped frames issue. I will check back in a few weeks and let you know if this was a coincidence or a real solution. Hope this helps.
On a side note, Sage really needs to come up with a better, more definitive way to easily get perfect playback on clients. Whether it is walking through some kind of "wizard" that asks you for hardware specs or even a highly organized area of the forum with hardware configs and success rates. I have spent far too much time and have seen far too many forums posts from others on achieving smooth playback. It seems there should be SageTV recommended settings based on some basic hardware/software setups.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by ptzink

I wanted to revive this thread and perhaps derail it a bit in the process. I have been struggling to get perfect video with my Aspire Revo 3610 client for the last 9 months. My video (mpeg2 and VOB) has always been acceptable (my wife thinks it's fine), but I always notice skips/dropped frames every so often. Sometimes the dropped frames are every couple minutes, sometimes it seems it goes 10 minutes without a dropped frame. But there always seemed to be several skips with in the span of a regular show/movie. The audio has always been fine no matter what decoder I use. Here are my video settings:
- Video Renderer = EVR
- MPEG-2/H.264/DVD Video Decoder = Microsoft DTV-DVD Video Decoder
- 3D Acceleration = Enabled
- Use FSE Mode = Enabled
I have ruled out any issues being on the server side because I have an HD300 extender that plays everything smooth as silk. So I started to look at settings outside of Sage that may improve the dropped frames that I was having. And I think I may have found a setting that greatly reduces if not eliminates the dropped frames. In the Nvidia control panel under "Adjust video image settings" I unchecked the "Use Inverse Telecine" box which is checked by default. This seems counter intuitive to me since this setting is supposed to IMPROVE 1080i and DVD playback, but unchecking this box seemed to improve my dropped frames issue. I will check back in a few weeks and let you know if this was a coincidence or a real solution. Hope this helps.
On a side note, Sage really needs to come up with a better, more definitive way to easily get perfect playback on clients. Whether it is walking through some kind of "wizard" that asks you for hardware specs or even a highly organized area of the forum with hardware configs and success rates. I have spent far too much time and have seen far too many forums posts from others on achieving smooth playback. It seems there should be SageTV recommended settings based on some basic hardware/software setups.

Glad to see you figured something out. I agree that getting quality playback on the client is very difficult. It took me about 9 months to get it right as well. I don't think the limitation is sage so much as the vast possibilities of hardware and decoder combinations. Once you find the combination that works for you, you are golden, but that can take quite a long time and to be honest is mostly due to settings like you found.

What would help is if we made a list of what we all use successfully as clients and list the hardware and software congratulations. This would cut down the threads quickly (if people found the list that is).

[ptzink]

Well, it looks like I spoke too soon. Must have been coincidence. I watched and hour long recording tonight and got several skips. And also got skips while watching a movie. It definitely isn't any worse, however. The quest continues. If anyone has any insight on how they got perfect playback on an Aspire Revo 3610, I am all ears. I feel like this should be easier and not need any tweaking . What gives?

[g-man]

Just my 2 cents here but the last time I had issues with jerky playback I switched to the Nvidia PureVideo Decoder, this fixed all of my jerky/stuttering issues. They have a free 30 day trial so it wouldn't hurt to give it a shot.

[ptzink]

Originally Posted by g-man

Just my 2 cents here but the last time I had issues with jerky playback I switched to the Nvidia PureVideo Decoder, this fixed all of my jerky/stuttering issues. They have a free 30 day trial so it wouldn't hurt to give it a shot.

G-man, in my old setup with Win XP and a combined server/client I used PureVideo as well with good results. I played HD recordings on a SD TV. I would be willing to try PV out again, but don't see a version for Windows 7 x64. I have tried PDVD11, MS DTV-DVD, and SageTV decoders and have definitely had the most luck with MS decoders. As I mentioned above, my playback is NOT consistently jerky or unwatchable, there are just dropped frames on occasion that are enough to be highly annoying.

[panteragstk]

I've used quite a few mpeg2 decoders and this one has been the best for me. I use a geforce 8800gt and never have dropped frames.

[ptzink]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

I've used quite a few mpeg2 decoders and this one has been the best for me. I use a geforce 8800gt and never have dropped frames.

panreragstk thanks for the link, but I was unable to get it to work. I am willing to try different individual decoders, but have all but sworn off codec packs. I have heard too many bad stories about them and had some bad experiences of my own. BTW, do you know of software that will tell you when and how many frames have been dropped during playback. I just find it weird that for the most part the video playback is fine and CPU usage is low (15-20%), but it still drops frames on occasion. Does anyone know of any other settings I should check outside of Sage to resolve this? Nvidia settings? Refresh rates on the Revo or on the HDTV?

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by ptzink

panreragstk thanks for the link, but I was unable to get it to work. I am willing to try different individual decoders, but have all but sworn off codec packs. I have heard too many bad stories about them and had some bad experiences of my own. BTW, do you know of software that will tell you when and how many frames have been dropped during playback. I just find it weird that for the most part the video playback is fine and CPU usage is low (15-20%), but it still drops frames on occasion. Does anyone know of any other settings I should check outside of Sage to resolve this? Nvidia settings? Refresh rates on the Revo or on the HDTV?

I had a 3450 ati card and had dropped frames every once in a while. Upgrading to a more powerful card solved that problem. The link I put wasn't for a codec pack. Those do nothing but cause issues like you said. Download this file "11-4_vista_win7_32-64_xcode.exe". It is an mpeg 2 decoder from amd. It works better for me than any other mpeg2 decoder for TV. For dvd's I use powerdvd 8 decoder.

[aweber1nj]

Like some of you, I'm struggling to find the best setup on my STV Server and Atom/ION nettop client. I'm positive it's not a "one size fits all" solution, but I agree that there should be some kind of list compiled of results to save everyone some time.

Even though a n00b, I don't agree that "a codec pack will do nothing but cause issues" (to paraphrase). As it stands, most of them are just collections of codecs that you can select from (some have halfway-decent "settings apps"). Codecs that you're not using aren't going to hurt anything by sitting on your disk. As I see it, it just simplifies getting a bundle of codecs to test instead of having to go randomly dl each one individually. I obviously could be wrong...

FWIW: on my 4-core STV server with 8600gts card, so far the best seems to be FFDshow DXVA codec and gabest splitter (when I have more time I fully intend to try more combos, as I don't think it's "flawless" yet). However, on my nettop with ION2 graphics, I'm using PDVD11 with DXVA and it seems pretty flawless.

[ptzink]

panteragstk, Thanks for the link to the Avivo codec. I was able to install it, but I had to manually register the 32-bit decoder (SageTV didn't see the 64-bit decoder). For some reason it gave me an error registering the dll on install, but manually registering it worked fine so no big deal. Unfortunately, it didn't seem to help much (although, once again, didn't seem any worse than the MS DTV-DVD decoder). In fact, I have found that the MS, PDVD11, and ATI decoders seem to perform similarly on my system - which is to say 'good' but not 'perfect'. So I moved outside of Sage to try and find solutions. In the Nvidia control panel, I tried setting Vertical Sync to "force on" (vs. Application setting) and triple buffering to 'On' (vs. Off). That didn't seem to do a lot either. The tough part is that I see no consistency as to when the frames are dropped. Sometimes it can play stutter free for several minutes at a time (usually when I am do a video quality test and think I have fixed it). Other times, it will skip 2 or 3 times in a 30 second span (usually when we are actually trying to watch a show ). I am starting to think maybe my standards are too high, but I never see these little skips on the HD300. I know the Aspire Revo has the power and the CPU rarely goes over 25%. So I am baffled as to what is causing this. I would love the 'silver bullet' to fix this.

[aweber1nj]

I had this suggested to me in another thread: Have you tried playback of a video via VLC or similar (i.e. outside of Sage)? If it's OK in there, then maybe it's the Sage portion of the config versus the general codec -- unless VLC has its own codecs embedded, in which case we should find out what those are!

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by aweber1nj

I had this suggested to me in another thread: Have you tried playback of a video via VLC or similar (i.e. outside of Sage)? If it's OK in there, then maybe it's the Sage portion of the config versus the general codec -- unless VLC has its own codecs embedded, in which case we should find out what those are!

VLC and sage aren't related because sage has it's own splitter. The way that sage handles decoders isn't the same as other applications. Most of them rely on merit within dshow, while sage won't unless you have everything set to default.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by ptzink

panteragstk, Thanks for the link to the Avivo codec. I was able to install it, but I had to manually register the 32-bit decoder (SageTV didn't see the 64-bit decoder). For some reason it gave me an error registering the dll on install, but manually registering it worked fine so no big deal. Unfortunately, it didn't seem to help much (although, once again, didn't seem any worse than the MS DTV-DVD decoder). In fact, I have found that the MS, PDVD11, and ATI decoders seem to perform similarly on my system - which is to say 'good' but not 'perfect'. So I moved outside of Sage to try and find solutions. In the Nvidia control panel, I tried setting Vertical Sync to "force on" (vs. Application setting) and triple buffering to 'On' (vs. Off). That didn't seem to do a lot either. The tough part is that I see no consistency as to when the frames are dropped. Sometimes it can play stutter free for several minutes at a time (usually when I am do a video quality test and think I have fixed it). Other times, it will skip 2 or 3 times in a 30 second span (usually when we are actually trying to watch a show ). I am starting to think maybe my standards are too high, but I never see these little skips on the HD300. I know the Aspire Revo has the power and the CPU rarely goes over 25%. So I am baffled as to what is causing this. I would love the 'silver bullet' to fix this.

With my nvidia card I had similar issues and it was a bad driver. I verified this yesterday because my dev machine had the same issue as my client. Once I updated the drivers on my client the issues went away. Nvidia is notorious for breaking video playback while "tweaking" game performance.

[ptzink]

panteragstk, thanks for the suggestion. It had been a month or two since my last driver upgrade. Unfortunately, the drive upgrade did not help. So frustrating. I am also experiencing these issues in several different softwares with the same video (boxee, Windows Media Player 12, etc).
Perhaps I should start another thread for this, but can anyone who has an Aspire Revo r3610 specifically post there settings for the following:
- Renderer, video decoders, FSE, and Hardware Acceleration settings in SageTV
- Nvidia settings outside of SageTV
- Other pertinent software (virus protection, firewall, ?)
I know other Atom based machines should in theory be very similar, but I am trying to compare granny smith apples to granny smith apples - if you catch my drift - to eliminate variables. Thanks.