Service/Application CPU Priority?

[Stuntman]

I'm FINALLY recording in HD! It looks great on my HD Extender.. HOWEVER, it won't play on my 2 Hauppauge MVP units.. too choppy! I have a Dual Processor Athlon XP 3600+ PC with 3GB of RAM.. but it just doesn't seem to be enough to transcode well.. I was wondering..

Would it or is it possible to perhaps bump up the CPU priority on the Transcoding? If I could get the PC to give more processor to the transcoder, maybe that would help??

Just a thought!

How about Sage making a build for multiple processor units?? I imagine most of us have them at this point!

[GKusnick]

Bumping the priority would help only if there's some other program running that uses significant amounts of CPU. You could achieve the same effect by figuring out what that other program is and shutting it down.

Both Sage and Java make extensive use of threading and are therefore already adapted for multiple CPUs. However I believe that transcoding is by its nature a sequential process with no significant degree of parallelism, and therefore runs in a single thread. So what you'll tend to see is the transcoder using most or all of one CPU, and everything else using the other CPU. I don't think there's much that can be done about that.

[Taddeusz]

Are you transcoding with Standard or High? Your 3600 is too slow to do the high quality transcoding. On the AMD side you need at least a 2.4Ghz CPU but in my experience it actually needs to be faster than that. I have an X2 4200 which I used to have overclocked to 2.4Ghz and it still wouldn't do the high quality transcoding. My X2 3800 was enough to do the standard quality transcoding. Not sure if your 3600 should be enough for it but 100Mhz shouldn't make that much difference.

[Stuntman]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

Are you transcoding with Standard or High? Your 3600 is too slow to do the high quality transcoding. On the AMD side you need at least a 2.4Ghz CPU but in my experience it actually needs to be faster than that. I have an X2 4200 which I used to have overclocked to 2.4Ghz and it still wouldn't do the high quality transcoding. My X2 3800 was enough to do the standard quality transcoding. Not sure if your 3600 should be enough for it but 100Mhz shouldn't make that much difference.

I was wrong with my specs.. I have:
AMD Athlon 64 X2
Core Processor 4800+
3GB RAM


I had to change the transcoding from High to Standard to be able to watch at all as the stuttering was terrible. I noticed that the transcode application runs at below normal CPU priority, which is why I asked earlier if that could be bumped up.. thought perhaps it should be given a bit higher priority than some of the other things going on at the server end.. but from what I hear, that might not or would not help..

[Taddeusz]

Yea, I don't know how you'd actually change the priority of it. AFAIK, the priority of the program would probably be set by SageTV each time it's launched.

Personally, I just bought one of the HD Extenders to get around this very problem. That way my server doesn't have to do any transcoding. It has a few problems that I'm sure will be ironed out but so far I've really liked it.

[Stuntman]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

Personally, I just bought one of the HD Extenders to get around this very problem. That way my server doesn't have to do any transcoding.

That would be IDEAL.. for sure! But I have 3 MVP's in my house now.. and buying 3 HD Extenders, even if they are priced well.. would set me back over $600!!! So.. I have 1 HD Extender now, and I will suffer through with the 2 remaining MVP's.. I'll probably try to Ebay the MVP's, but don't imagine I'll get enough to buy even one more HD Extender out of their sale.. So, I've just been tinkering trying to get it to work as best as possible.

[CollinR]

I need some help here too, as I am in the same boat.

Having this set as it is is great for compression but ANYTHING that needs a couple of cycles will steal them from the MVP transcoding FIRST as on my system there is nothing below "Below Normal".

[swats]

Weird... I don't have any problems transcoding to my MVP with HD streams captured by my HDHR or from my firewire box, except for the occasional chipmunk audio. I have a AMD 4200+ dual core as well. Maybe the mpeg2 codec plays a role in the cpu usage? I am using NVIDIA's codec and have sage running in service mode. Good luck.

[jjstok]

I had the same problem on my MVP. I'm using a highend PE server too. I've had to resort to watching all my playbacks in standard view in the Media Extender Conversion Quality. The picture suffers but at least 99% it works. Sage support has been no help. They said recently they were too busy with the new extender roll-out. Really lame service.

[CollinR]

Originally Posted by jjstok

Sage support has been no help. They said recently they were too busy with the new extender roll-out. Really lame service.

Oh man I'm sorry I guesss I should have replied earlier, when I contacted support they let me know that they were aware and these provisions would be included in v6.3.8.

The property to modify will be:

xcode_process_priority_streaming=abovenormal


Sorry about that, I just already hijacked this thread enough.