Stuttering - driving me crazy; help

[sabre]

Well, after i did a reinstall to fix another issue, i now have a different issue. About every 10 seconds or so, the video actually slows down for maybe 1/2 to 1 second, although the audio sounds the same. I tried reclock before (on the stutter), but that made things much worse.

There does seem to be some spike in CPU usage, but does not really coincide w/ the slowdown/jerky picture, but it does not go all the way to 100% (and it seems to system task?? ZA issue?)

Still think nvdvd 3 is the best (all decoders do it - can really see it in scrolling text), but wonder if any can point out something i may be missing.

[David Lawrance]

My problem finally went away when I yanked out what was probably a failing audio card.

[sabre]

Hey DL, so you removed the card, and replaced it with a new one? Did you move the PCI slot that it was in?

[abasu2003]

are you hearing a disk churn with your stutter?

[David Lawrance]

I didn't replace the card, but yanked out the Prodigy card (and darn, I really liked it) and switched to the motherboard for sound support. So, nothing is in that slot, now. I really don't know what the heck I'm talking about... I'm guessing that the card was grabbing the bus for itself at intervals lasting way too long or something like that. Whatever the card was doing wasn't helping to do anything except to drive me crazy.

This real-time stuff is like trying to stay on top of a bucking bronco. Given the tight connections among software, motherboard, memory, processor, encoders, disk drives display cards, and sound, it's kind of amazing that anything works at all.

Trying to force pretty good to become very good has been fraught with surprises, some of them very pleasant, and more that just fry the brain. You have to be nuts to do this instead of just purchasing a Tivo. I love it (I hate it.)

[jptaz]

Amen David...

I hope I can get my stuff working 100% soon...
It is pretty frustrating to be watching TV and all of a sudden have every thing pause for 5 to 10 seconds. It only happens like once an hour, but it is still annoying.

John

[turak]

DX9.0c that came with SP2 has caused problems for me on two seperate computers, one with an ATI card and one with a nVidia card. If I enable hardware acceleration in NVDVD or sonic, I get massive stuttering. It's a shame too because my video quality is alot better with hardware acceleration enabled. You may want to check if you have hardware acceleration enabled within the nvdvd app.

[sabre]

I certainly have hardware acceleration, or else my CPU would be up close to 80-90%, and then it really drags the whole thing down. But i will test again to see.

[carmat3]

Could it have been an IRQ issue?

[jptaz]

I remembered something that I saw posted on the forums that so far seems to have addressed my pausing issues (Several hours with no pausing).

open regedit and check the BufferSize and NumBuffers keys under the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Frey Technologies\Common\DSFilters\MpegDeMux

So far I kept my BufferSize at its initial size of 64KB, but moved the NumBuffers to 352(hex 160).

John

[aTvTinkerer]

Please let us know if you are still 'stutter-free'.
I also have this problem and it's driving me nuts.

When I first put the system together, I never saw this problem

Then, I bought a low profile HTPC case and was forced to move the video and PVR 350 card to different slots in order to use the card riser (for 90 degree card placement).
It was then that I satarted to see the stuttering problem.

I was beginning to think it was a slot placement issue which meant that as long as I used this $140 case, there isn't anything I can do about it.

I plan to try this registry change as soon as I can gain access to the system (The stuttering bothers me more than it bothers my kids!).

Originally posted by jptaz
I remembered something that I saw posted on the forums that so far seems to have addressed my pausing issues (Several hours with no pausing).

open regedit and check the BufferSize and NumBuffers keys under the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Frey Technologies\Common\DSFilters\MpegDeMux

So far I kept my BufferSize at its initial size of 64KB, but moved the NumBuffers to 352(hex 160).

John

[jptaz]

So far watching TV all day today with no pausing.

I will keep you posted.

[sabre]

Very interesting.

My buffersize is 32 (20 hex) and NumBuffers is 10000 hex (65k something decimal)--wonder why it is so much different than yours?

[jptaz]

I made the change on the client.

I suspect it is an issue with slower drives, slower PC for the server or some lag in the software sending data to the client pc. I should be pausing at times, but because I have a big enough buffers it does not pause. I see periods where no data is sent on the network, but my buffer compensates for the hiccup.

With the new buffers I have 22,528 KB
The Default Buffers is only 2,048 KB

I use 3.25GB/HR as my recording quality.
This works out to about 903 KB a second data rate.

So the default buffers are basically 2 seconds of video.

My new buffers gives me 25 seconds of video to be able to conpemsate for any interruptions caused by network traffic, SageTV using too much CPU, Drive Speed, etc. I tend to think this is network or software related as I have never seen a pause when watching on the server.

John

[bri]

Hello all-
I've been a Sage user for about 1 month and three days ago I started experiencing the stuttering video problem - just out of the blue. I followed about every tip and trick that's been posted on this site but found my issue to be entirely differrent.

The hard drive I save my videos changed from Ultra DMA to PIO transfer mode. I don't have a clue how this occurred but after about 1 day of troubleshooting I found this out- odd. Nothing changed in the bios so I have to blame it on good old Windows 2K.

Long story short, after I tweaked my system and got it back in order (ie Ultra DMA mode) the video problem went away-smooth sailing. Possibly my system is possessed because all of the original settings I had for video rendering, etc have to be set different in order for it to function now.
What other surprises does the future hold?


Just thought I would give my $.02 to this topic.

brian

[jptaz]

Brian,

I had the same issue, but it didn't solve the problems on my Clients. That is strange that yours happened out of the blue. I distincly remembered changing something in the BIOS when it happened.

Do you watch using SageTVClient or SageTV?

Even when I had PIO mode I didn't have stuttering on the Main SageTV System.


John

[bri]

John-

I'm running only the main SageTV software not the client version.

brian

[jptaz]

Also Just an Update since last Friday when I made the registry changes I have not had a single unexplained pause.

If I do something dumb like send a large PDF to be printed it will still briefly pause TV because when the print spooler kicks in it causes my CPU to peg at 100% for a while on large complex image files.

I am thinking about dropping in a new CPU at some point to help with these situations. An XP 3000+ is approaching the $100 mark.

John

[aTvTinkerer]

I , too, made the registry change last Sunday and the pauses are gone (I run SageTV in stand-alone mode, rather than client/server).

However, I also changed the NTFS video partition to 64k clusters, taking the belt & suspenders approach.

Well, the pausing may be gone, but now Sage crashes every time I try to play a show that was recorded earlier.
Since I'm not sure which of these two actions caused this, I need to find some time to restore a backup and make these changes one at a time.

Originally posted by jptaz
Also Just an Update since last Friday when I made the registry changes I have not had a single unexplained pause.

If I do something dumb like send a large PDF to be printed it will still briefly pause TV because when the print spooler kicks in it causes my CPU to peg at 100% for a while on large complex image files.

I am thinking about dropping in a new CPU at some point to help with these situations. An XP 3000+ is approaching the $100 mark.

John