stuttering when playing recordings, ok with live tv

[GreggP]

I'm running SageTV V6.2.10.152 on a system with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 2 GB RAM, an MSI NX8600GT graphics card, Dell 2405FPW 1920x1200 monitor and Vista Ultimate. I'm also using an HDHomeRun.

I have NVIDIA PureVideo installed along with ffdshow, ac3filer and probably a few other codecs that might be causing problems.

After upgrading SageTV recently, I noticed that when playing recorded shows, the video will play fine for about 20 minutes and then it will start stuttering. The video will stutter for about 15 seconds, then play smooth for a few minutes and then stutter for a longer period, etc. until it gets progressively worse and worse. When I play the same file using VLC it plays fine -- no stuttering at all. Again, it did not do this before upgrading about a week ago. I hate going back to older version, because it forced me to remap my channels and I don't want to go through that since I have them all set the way I want. I also don't seem to have any performance issues when watching live television.

Since I have PureVideo installed, I have Video Renderer set to VMR9, MPEG2 Video Decoder Filter set to NVIDIA Video Decoder, MPEG4 Playback to DirectShow, and all other video related settings to default. The Audio Renderer is set to my soundcard and MPEG2 Audio Decoder Filter is AC3Filter. When playing an MPEG file, the NVIDIA decoders icon on the task tray appears, but when I right click and select Decoder Properties it doesn't display any dialog box.

I can display the Decoder Properties dialog if I run Vista's Windows Media Center and play one of the mpg files recorded by SageTV. I've also noticed similar stuttering when I try playing the SageTV recordings in WMC. The decoder properties show that Hardware acceleration is set and the Decoder Format is Software Mode YV12 and Undefined Renderer -- not sure what all this means. The Enhanced nView support is set to "Prefer VMR9. When viewing Windows Task Manager and playing a recording in SageTV the CPU Usage hovers areound 20% (when playing the same file in WMC CPU usage is around 60%).

How do I determine if the PureVideo codec is installed properly?

[GreggP]

I've also tried modifying the filter merits (using GSpot) of some of these codecs, but it didn't seem to make any difference. It would help if I had more expertise with this sort of tool, but I don't...

Well, it looks like nobody else has experienced the same problem, so I may try taking this to Sage's tech support.

[Djc208]

There's another user with similar issues and a similar setup might want to look into that one. As I said there I'd try using the purevideo codec for the audio and video, I had issues trying to use ac3filter and purevideo together, went away when I disabled ac3filter and had it use the purevideo codec for audio too.

[dvd_maniac]

Count me in here as well.

I installed Purevideo and selected them in Sage as the Video and Audio codec of choice. Still stuttering...

@ DJC
Did you actually disable ac3filter somewhere or did you just select Purevideo for audio?

[zetronboy]

After installing the latest ver 6.2.10 of SageTV I noticed HD playback was very choppy. It consumed all of the CPU resources and made Sage unresponsive. I noticed a new icon in the tooltray with a green arrow called DirectVOBSub that does subtitles. I messed with my filter priorities in DFSmanager but no help. I reinstalled the PureVideo decoder and that fixed the issue. The PureVideo decoder is hardware accelerated and super fast compared to others I have tested.
BTW I use AC3 filter for audio. My computer is an AMD3000+ w/2G ram Gforce 6600.
Also is your recordings drive formated for 64K clusters? Should be. Also a new fast HD or SATA drive may help in general.

[dvd_maniac]

Size is 64K clusters using 3x320GB SATA II hard drives in a striped raid-0 setup.
All my videos work fine outside of Sage.
System is a quad-core Q6600 with 2x1GB DDR2 1066 ram and P35 chipset Motherboard. Everything is SUPER fast and I can honestly say that it must be related to Sage/Vista because I just put this system together and have it dual booting XP/Vista. All software setup is the same in both operating systems and XP gives me NO PROBLEMS with playback of the same files...

[GreggP]

Originally Posted by zetronboy

After installing the latest ver 6.2.10 of SageTV I noticed HD playback was very choppy. It consumed all of the CPU resources and made Sage unresponsive. I noticed a new icon in the tooltray with a green arrow called DirectVOBSub that does subtitles. I messed with my filter priorities in DFSmanager but no help. I reinstalled the PureVideo decoder and that fixed the issue. The PureVideo decoder is hardware accelerated and super fast compared to others I have tested.
BTW I use AC3 filter for audio. My computer is an AMD3000+ w/2G ram Gforce 6600.
Also is your recordings drive formated for 64K clusters? Should be. Also a new fast HD or SATA drive may help in general.

I tried re-installing PureVideo and even upgraded to PureVideo Platinum. I also have 320 GB SATA drives with 64K clusters. I've tried defragging, etc., but still have lots of stuttering with recorded files. The stuttering doesn't start until at least 10 or 20 minutes into a program. And, I don't seem to have performance problems when watching live HD programs.

I left a message with Sage tech support and they suggest running the configuration wizard's "Configure Video Playback" routine. They told me to start with the basic configuration to see if it stutters and work my way up to the advanced configuration (none of the standard configurations match my settings because I use VMR9/Nvidia Decoder and AC3Filter). Anyhow, this test doesn't seem to help because it only seems to work with live video. If I play a recorded file before the test, it still switches to live.

[dvd_maniac]

I only get the stuttering when I use Max Mpeg-2 recording quality (12Mbit/s).
I changed my default quality to Best and no more stuttering.
I would think that this points to hard drive performance issue, however, I do not have any issue with playing the same files in any other player...Zoomplayer, Showtime or WMP11.
I also do not have any issues in XP (Dual boot) even in Sage.
That tells me that it is not HHD performance issue. It must have something to do with Sage and Vista combination. I have Purevideo installed in both systems and have tried every different combination of playback in Sage.
I can mostly live without Max Mpeg-2 quality except for Sports Games.
Now me living in the Boston Mass area, it sucked watching the Patriots and World Series games last night with the stuttering...
But after last night I guess I can't be too mad at anything

[crasch]

When the stuttering is happening, do you have the sage transcoder running in the background. When I end the sage transcoder process my stuttering stops. What ever changes they made to this version of sage seem to be an issue with the transcoder on my machines. Like the guys above, I'm running a Q6600 with raid 5 setup (6 500GB WDC RE2 w/ 256MB cache RAID controler) having the same issues on both my main sage and client boxes. All connected via Gigabit.
Check your processes and see if stopping the Sage Transcoder process stops the stuttering.

[GreggP]

Originally Posted by crasch

When the stuttering is happening, do you have the sage transcoder running in the background. When I end the sage transcoder process my stuttering stops. What ever changes they made to this version of sage seem to be an issue with the transcoder on my machines. Like the guys above, I'm running a Q6600 with raid 5 setup (6 500GB WDC RE2 w/ 256MB cache RAID controler) having the same issues on both my main sage and client boxes. All connected via Gigabit.
Check your processes and see if stopping the Sage Transcoder process stops the stuttering.

I'll give this a try. I've been using VLC to play the recordings during the last few days because of the stuttering problems when I try to play with SageTV. I also noticed some stuttering during playback with VLC, so I checked Task Manager and noticed there were 4 instances of the SageTV Transcoder running. I ended the processes of 3 out of the 4 and the stuttering went away. The remaining instance wouldn't end because SageTV was recording another show.

I wonder if the latest version/update is no longer shutting down the transcoder when it is finished. They seem to be accumulating and each are chewing up memory and CPU usage.

[dvd_maniac]

Why would the transcoder be running on the server?
In my case, my experience tells me that it is something Vista is doing with the hard drive bandwitdh. Indexing maybe?
I have no transcoders running on the server when stuttering is happening and have no problems with the same files in XP.

[GreggP]

I've also niticed that the stuttering still occurs when the Transcoder isn't running.

SageTV tech support has asked me to run the configuration to try all the different video decoding options, from basic, medium to advanced to see if the stuttering still occurs. Unfortunately, I have to play a recording for up to 40 minutes before it will start stuttering. So it is a pretty tedius process to perform this sort of test. It's unfortunate that a lot of these companies don't have enough support and QA resources to do this type of testing in-house and have to rely on their users for this sort of thing.

[kirkb]

GreggP,

I have the exact same problem. It doesn't seem to be performance related and it is difficult to describe to others. Most people think it is an decoder issue. Everything will be fine. We got through 60+mins of an HD network recording of Runaway Jury last night. Then things went down hill. I would have to pause and rewind 30secs or so. Sometimes that would fix it for up to 10mins sometime it wouldn't. Drivin me crazy

Brand new server AMD X2 5200, SATA 750GB, Vista 32, 2 x avermedia m780 cards OTA HD, Gforce 7600 GS, Purvideo (merits set properly and icon in the tray) AC3 filters. Tried just about everything.

Please let us know if you find an answer to this issue.

[bbig119]

Originally Posted by kirkb

GreggP,

I have the exact same problem. It doesn't seem to be performance related and it is difficult to describe to others. Most people think it is an decoder issue. Everything will be fine. We got through 60+mins of an HD network recording of Runaway Jury last night. Then things went down hill. I would have to pause and rewind 30secs or so. Sometimes that would fix it for up to 10mins sometime it wouldn't. Drivin me crazy

Brand new server AMD X2 5200, SATA 750GB, Vista 32, 2 x avermedia m780 cards OTA HD, Gforce 7600 GS, Purvideo (merits set properly and icon in the tray) AC3 filters. Tried just about everything.

Please let us know if you find an answer to this issue.

I've got the same problem. In my previous build with XP, things were fine. In my upgrade computer (gigabyte p53 board, intel e4500, ati 3850, 2 gig ram) and Vista I get a stutter and most notably a very fast switching on my receiver display between digital and prologic decoding during playback. Live TV appears fine in Sage, but recordings will hiccup. This problem only happens on digital recordings(HD) and not on every one. Even on the problem recordings it'll be fine for a period of time and then stutter. If I pause and restart or skip back I can sometimes play through the section that was just giving me problems fine, but not always. These recordings(even those from before the upgrade when everything played fine in Sage) will also stutter and produce this digital/prologic flipping in VLC(when spdif is selected) as well as zoom player.

Is this a codec issue? Could it be vista and the realtek sound chip on the motherboard? This is completely frusterating. If I can find an extra hard drive, I'm considering trying to restore my old XP image on it to test if this is related to Vista or not.

any ideas?