HD tv watching: Loud audio chirping and video choppiness

[LookyC]

Hello there,

First post here so apologies here for noobiness, but I keep running into this issue of unpleasant choppiness, pixelation (not "pix elation" as my spell checker would prefer), and really loud sharp chirps and audio stuttering, when trying to watch any hi-res HD TV.

I'm getting all my Comcast cable channels and all the analog and lower-res digital channels work fine. I'm ok briefly on the HD but pretty soon it gets bad. It's not unwatchable usually, but the audio has to be muted.

At first I was on lesser hardware, first one and then split across two machines for frontend/backend but now using an AMD Athlon II x4, 8GB RAM, and 1GB Nvidia STS 250. Audio is built-in Realtek ALC892/ALC889. I tried the default ext4 on the SATA II 250GB drive but currently trying ext3 (but for all the bad press, ext4 seemed faster).

If someone has the inclination to help me take a fresh approach on this, I'd much appreciate it.

[LookyC]

If I can give this a bump, most things I read pointed to disk access, and preferring a drive formatted with large sectors (64Kb). However I don't see where that's an option under Linux, since you're limited to the kernel's paging size. I saw various Windows users going to 64Kb but what are you clean Linux runners doing for smooth disk access? Smooth video is doable on SATA II 7200rpm, correct?

[harrijay]

I don't use linux for playback, but what kind of HD video are you trying to playback? is it being recorded from an HDPVR or from something OTA? I am runnning just the linux server but I watch everything through HD extenders and do not have any issue. I have tried setting my recording drives as XFS, EXT3 and EXT4 and did not notice anything between them, besides delete times.

My thought is that even though you have plenty of hardware Sage on linux is not using your video card properly which is why you have the studder. I believe the chirping is coming from trying to decode the audio stream, DTS or something else.

Sorry I cannot be more help.

Jayson

[LookyC]

Jason, you are spot on.

My problem was apparently weak video signal. Or rather the Hauppauge HVR 1600 is a bit deaf on its digital "ear".

Last night I set up my splitters differently and added a simple in-out +10db amplifier to just my digital receive side. It made all the difference in the world.

As previous threads also indicate or hint at (hindsight is 20-20), you can think you have a perfectly good signal, because (a) your regular TV always looked fine, (b) SageTV reports 100% signal strength, (c) your dual-tuner card seems to be working fine otherwise, and (d) your cable modem Internet works fine.

Onwards.