Slow Motion Video........Aaaahhhhh.. Help!!!

[justplainnuts]

I am having problems with slow motion video when I try to play a recorded mpeg file on any mpeg player including Windows Media Player 9 and NVDVD. I have the same problem with S-video out and when playing on computer monitor. I am running SageTV 2.0. Video seems to spit and spitter but mostly runs in slow motion. I have the following set up:

ASUS MB w/ AMD 1.33 GHz Processor
768 MB Ram
ATI Radeon 7000
Hauppauge 250-MCE
Maxtor 250 GB HD
Hitachi 250 GB HD
Soundblaster Live Value sound card

I was running all this on a ABIT MB with an P4 2.4 GHz Prescott processor and 1GB of Ram and everything was fine. I decided to switch motherbords because I wanted the horse power on my desktop PC and thought the 2.4 GHz prescott was overkill for a PVR. Now I can't get it to work right with the other set up.

By the way, I have tried formatting my HD to 64Kb block size and defraging. Niether help to cure the problem. I have noticed that if I skip backwards over video that I just played everything is fine. But when the playback get to the video that has not been played yet it goes back to the slow motion. Also, my processor consumption goes from about 25-30% to 55-65%. So something is causing the processor to work overtime. Watching live TV is even worse. The video is slow and spits and sputters.

Please help me before I loose my sanity!

Thanks in advance!

[Gog]

Originally Posted by justplainnuts

I have noticed that if I skip backwards over video that I just played everything is fine. But when the playback get to the video that has not been played yet it goes back to the slow motion.

If you can skip backward and it's fine I'm guessing a transfer rate issue with your hard drive.

I would try to play files on both hard drives to see if there is a difference and I would also try to put each hard drive alone on it's IDE channel.

Anybody know a good test program to test the available bandwith ?

Do you have an antivirus that does real time file check ? Was the PC doing something else ?

Gog

[justplainnuts]

Thank you for the reply. This is driving me crazy. Especially since I had it all working beautifully before.

Each HD is on its own cable and IDE controller. I have tried playing on both drives - same problem. I have norton running in the background but I don't know what all it is doing. There are no other programs doing anything when I run Sage. This machine is a dedicated PVR. And by the way, I am running Windows 2000 with all the updates an service packs installed. I don't think it is a resource issue because it's only using 65% of the processor at most and 33% of memory. I don't think it is a decoder issue because I used the Windows Media player decoder on the other machine and this one and even tried NVDVD on this one. But still have the same problem.

As far as I can tell, the only thing that is diiferent between the two systems is the processor speed and different motherboards. I am stumped! Please anyone, help!

[Gog]

Originally Posted by justplainnuts

I have norton running in the background but I don't know what all it is doing. There are no other programs doing anything when I run Sage. This machine is a dedicated PVR. I don't think it is a resource issue because it's only using 65% of the processor at most and 33% of memory.

Try to disable Norton and if it helps you should be able to tell norton not to watch the drives/directories used by sage.

Also check if DMA mode is enabled for your drives

Gog

[justplainnuts]

I think it is a DMA problem. However, I cannot get the secondary IDE controller changed to Ultra DMA. It is stuck on PIO Mode. The Primary is set to Ultra DMA but I cannot change the Secondary where my mpeg files are. I've tried switching the cables to put my D:\ drive on the primary but it now says PIO for the Primary and Ultra DMA for the secondary. Where do I go to change my D: drive controller to Ultra DMA? This has got to be the problem. How do I fix it?

[mls]

Since you say this is with a new Asus motherboard... Could be in the BIOS setup. Check the BIOS settings (and the manual) for what might need to be changed.

On my Asus I had to turn on a setting for something like 32 bit support (forget now). Otherwise it had very poor, slow hard drive performance.

In fact, there were several other BIOS settings I had to change to get everything working correctly with the Asus board. Didn't have those problems with my GigaByte board. Don't know why the Asus BIOS is so tricky to set up.

[justplainnuts]

I checked the BIOS and its not a funtion of that. I need to know how to change the IDE controller from PIO to Ultra DMA. Device manager will not let me change it for some reason. Anyone?

[DGK]

This happened to me once when I had a bad cable, try using a different cable on the drive and make sure its ata133 or whatever. After I replaced the cable in mine I was able to get dma set again.

If that isnt your problem then this might help:
clicky

some more info: clicky2

hope this helps

[mls]

Originally Posted by justplainnuts

I checked the BIOS and its not a funtion of that. I need to know how to change the IDE controller from PIO to Ultra DMA. Device manager will not let me change it for some reason. Anyone?

You very likely won't be able to change it in Windows if the BIOS is not detecting correctly. If you have the BIOS set to display details on boot, the have your finger ready on the Pause key and reboot. Try to spot if the BIOS is showing it as PIO or UDMA (and what mode) when the machine boots.

If it's not showing UDMA 5 for that drive, then you a problem.

Is the cable for that drive an 80 wire cable? That is required for any drive ATA-66 or higher to work properly. You might have the older 40 wire style cable there. One of my motherboards came with an 80 for use with 2 hard drives on the primary controller, and a 40 wire cable for use with CD/DVD drives on the secondary.

Don't remember everything that was posted above, but thought I'd point out that you do need 80 wire cables connecting any EIDE hard drives.

[justplainnuts]

Ok, I had already suspected the cables. Both are 80 wire. I have switched both cables and IDE channels on different occasions. Its not the cables. Its not the bios. I paused on boot up (good idea mls!) and both HDs are UDMA 5 going into Windows. So Windows is switching my D: drive to PIO on start up. I can't find were to change the PIO/DMA settings in Windows. Device manager wont let me do it. DKG, I have not read your links yet. That will have to wait until I get to work later.

Thank you all for your input! Any ideas on how to change the PIO/DMA settings in Windows?

[mls]

I have noticed on at least one of my machines (with an Asus board btw) that Windows XP doesn't show the second drive as DMA until after it has been used (or for whatever reason until it feels like).

Try copying a couple small files back and forth between the drives and the check again what it shows for DMA or PIO. Since XP is SUPPOSED to adjust that by itself and not be a user changable option, maybe that's just the stupid behavior of XP your are seeing.

If it's doing that stupidity, then the problem is something else.

BTW: Didn't have those kinds of stupid problems with Win98SE here. Also had faster drive performance than I do with XP. Oh well.

[mls]

You don't happen to have a CD/DVD drive connected on the same cable with that hard drive do you? If so, it would most likely drop back down to the level of the CD/DVD drive.

Unless you have other hard drives, the CD/DVD drive(s) should be kept seperate on the secondary with the hard drives on the primary as Master and Slave.

Just something else to consider. Sorry I forgot to mention it before (since setting things up that was is pretty much standard operating procedure, I forget that others may not be doing so).

[justplainnuts]

I tried the regedit fix you pointed to in the link above. Unfortunately, it did not work. Moving files back and forth hasn't done anything either as I have done plenty of that throughout this process. I am running Windows 2000 not XP and the is only a HD on each IDE controller.

The only other thing that I can think of is that the HD in question was formated by another system and is a Dynamic drive accourding to disk management. I am reformatting now and yes I am using the 64K block size. I really don't think this will fix the problem, but I am running out of solutions.

More help needed. Anyone?

Thanks MLS!

[mls]

One think I had forgotten to ask and should have way back... by SLOW do you mean stuttering and pauses in playback? Or, do you mean as in slow motion (with slow audio also)?

If your getting slow-mo, then you may have a totally different problem I ran into once. I had set up a somewhat non-standard custom recording quality setting. It played back ok on the server machine, but on my client it played in slow-mo.

Had something to do with the software decoder I was using and some glitch in the beginning of that video file (combined with my odd custom recording setting).

Anyway, I ran that one file thru VideReDo to trim the first few seconds off and then it play fine.

So, maybe we've been on the wrong track with your problem. Don't know, but hope you do manage to solve it since it isn't the "normal" type of problem people have with SageTV (usually stutters/pauses if the hard drive isn't keeping up).

[mls]

BTW: Other than this SageTV problem, how's Win2K work for you? I REALLY don't like XP and have always wanted to try Win2K, but can't find a decent deal on it anywhere local. Just to expensive to buy yet another OS just to try out and then decide I don't like (at least Linux I can play with all the new distros for free, to bad they don't get SageTV ported over to that).

Otherwise, planning on an Apple next year and get out of this Microsoft nonsense if I can for other computer usage.

[justplainnuts]

No, as I said earlier, I don't think it is a decoder problem. I understand what you are saying. However, I have played the recorded file on the C: drive that is in UDMA mode and it is fine. The file and decoder are fine. It is the drive and/or drive setting (UDMA vs PIO) that is the problem.

I have read all the links that DGK has posted and here what I am going to try next:

Currently reformatting the HD hoping that the problem has something to do with it being formatted by another system.

Download DMACheck form Microsloth site - noodle with it.

Try other regedit suggestions mentioned in the links above.

Wait for more help from you guys.

Go to a gun store. Have a background check performed. Wait during the seven day waiting period. Buy a gun and shoot the computer or maybe just the offending harddrive. Then drag it behind my car for a few months. Use it for a boat anchor. And eventually reinstall it and trouble shoot some more.

Any better ideas?

[mls]

Originally Posted by justplainnuts

Go to a gun store. Have a background check performed. Wait during the seven day waiting period. Buy a gun and shoot the computer or maybe just the offending harddrive. Then drag it behind my car for a few months. Use it for a boat anchor. And eventually reinstall it and trouble shoot some more.

Any better ideas?

Actually, I feel that way about all Microsoft products

[justplainnuts]

Ok, flashed bios because it was seeing the 250 gig Hitachi as a 8 gig drive. I now have the latest bios for my MB. Still didn't change my problem. So I decided to hook up a CD-ROM in the HDs place. And what do you know, it goes to DMA with no problem. Hmmmm? I ran out of time this morning to fool with it. The problem must be with the HD itself. I currently have the jumpers set to Master. I am going to change it Slave and see what happens. Also, going to check Hitachi's site out for any set up info. Going to hook up a Maxtor 250 gig and a WD 40 gig and see if those will do DMA as well. I am wide open for suggestions at this point. Any other suggestions?

[flyingdog]

I had a similar problem when I installed TotalRecorder software.

It seems that It modified all audio encoding to go thru its drivers which slowed down
all DVD/video rendering regardless of the application. So check any software that you recently installed that might effect your audio or video.
Good Luck

[DFA]

Hmmmm....

I may be a day late and dollar short for this but I had this problem just yesterday when I activated the XP "Recording" feature for the DVD burner under the "properties" dialog (right click on burner drive icon in Explorer) and let the "Stash" file image location use the same drive that Sage uses (Drive H: a Raid0 2 - 250 GB SATA virtual drive). When I opened Sage from sleep, video and audio was in slow mo. Took me about 15 mins. to back track through other things I did to find that once I selected a different drive for the "image", everything went back to normal. Try that if you are still in trouble.

Weird thing too since no files were in the CDR recording que and no pending writes or write activity. Some kind of XP thing.

I also have Nero Burning ROM InCD and AnyDVD installed. Not sure if this problem I stumbled into is peculiar to being a virtual drive or an interaction with other burning SW. I would be curious to know if anyone else can duplicate this problem by setting the XP recording "image" location to the same drive that Sage uses. Just takes a second to do and undo.

DFA