where is my hiccup

[bigdessert]

I have a very simple setup.

one sagetv 6.3 box.

Specs:
p4 2.5ghz
512mb ddr400 mem
geforce mx5200 128mb video running out the dvi.
1-250gb sata hard drive
2-pvr-150 tuners
1-hvr-1600 running both qam hd and the analog tuner.

so i have 4 tuners, so basically 4 shows rec at once.

when i watch hd channels, like the lost, during the air time, it seems the video is a little choppy, not studdery choppy, but low frame rate choppy.

Now i just got done watching last nights lost episode that was already recorded to the drive and it played perfectly.

I am trying to figure out what the bottleneck is when watching that show during prime time.

Is my ram too low?

video card to low?

cpu?

need more hard drives?

please let me know your thoughts.

Please note that this problem only happens on hd channels

Thanks,

[Polypro]

I'm using 7 tuners: 3 HD and 4 SD. I've noticed what I thought were throughput problems when most of the tuners were recording. What I did to make it better (it seems so, so far) is to switch from using AHCI on my motherboard, to IDE Enhanced Mode. I then enabled all of Vista's cache'ing options (I'm hooked to a UPS). So far, so good. Check your hardware to see if that's available to you.

P

[heffe2001]

I'm running a similar system, and to watch HD I had to upgrade my video card & put a bit more ram. Is this machine the server as well? Mine's set up as a client machine connected to a seperate server. If you're going to be watching a lot of HD, you may be better served by making this a server machine, and putting one of the HD Extenders in it's place, should solve the stuttering problem, and it's cheaper than a new PC upgrade for the most part... (or at the very least, not nearly as much hassle as trying to figure out what card to put in, adding memory, tweaking settings, etc, I spent several weeks tweaking my decoders & such to get it working pretty well, but I'm replacing that client with a HD Extender as soon as UPS delivers it ).

Originally Posted by bigdessert

I have a very simple setup.

one sagetv 6.3 box.

Specs:
p4 2.5ghz
512mb ddr400 mem
geforce mx5200 128mb video running out the dvi.
1-250gb sata hard drive
2-pvr-150 tuners
1-hvr-1600 running both qam hd and the analog tuner.

so i have 4 tuners, so basically 4 shows rec at once.

when i watch hd channels, like the lost, during the air time, it seems the video is a little choppy, not studdery choppy, but low frame rate choppy.

[carlgar]

I would say it is probably a need for another disk. You have at least 4 streams writing, 1 reading and any misc IO such as Sage deleteing watched shows. It would also be useful to know what OS you are using. Your memory does appear to be a little lite.

[bigdessert]

Originally Posted by carlgar

I would say it is probably a need for another disk. You have at least 4 streams writing, 1 reading and any misc IO such as Sage deleteing watched shows. It would also be useful to know what OS you are using. Your memory does appear to be a little lite.

os is winxp pro.

[bigdessert]

Originally Posted by heffe2001

I'm running a similar system, and to watch HD I had to upgrade my video card & put a bit more ram. Is this machine the server as well? Mine's set up as a client machine connected to a seperate server. If you're going to be watching a lot of HD, you may be better served by making this a server machine, and putting one of the HD Extenders in it's place, should solve the stuttering problem, and it's cheaper than a new PC upgrade for the most part... (or at the very least, not nearly as much hassle as trying to figure out what card to put in, adding memory, tweaking settings, etc, I spent several weeks tweaking my decoders & such to get it working pretty well, but I'm replacing that client with a HD Extender as soon as UPS delivers it ).

the reason i have never wanted to use an hd extender or a mvp is because i use autoaspect svti and that wont work on hd extender or mvp.

[lobosrul]

I believe its your video card. I'd suggest an ATI 3450 (theyre cheap, and I've had one working perfectly for a week), and use the Nvidia PureVideo decoder in VMR9 mode. I was a bit surprised that they worked together.

In my experience, hard disk stuttering is clearly different than a bit of framerate slowdown. I have no problem recording and playing back two different HD streams at the same time. Add showanaylzer to the mix and then its sometimes unwatchable.

More RAM won't hurt either.

[RobJ]

Running WinXP Pro plus SageTV takes 650MB to 700MB on my system, according to Task Manager, the Commit Charge on the Performance tab. I too have only 512MB, max for this old machine, can't afford another computer just now. I think the recommended minimum memory requirement should be 1GB. That to me is the most important change you should make.

I agree with the others that your video card also looks too wimpy for smooth HD viewing.

I also recommend adding at least one more hard disk. You are not only recording from 4 tuners to the same drive, you have normal operating systems disk I/O occurring also, reading/writing temp files, the page file, SageTV files, and many other system-related disk activities. I don't recommend saving recordings to the same physical disk as your operating system. Moving the recordings to a separate drive would be better, and as others have said, adding more drives would be even better, as you can balance the recording writes between multiple drives.

[blade]

Originally Posted by bigdessert

the reason i have never wanted to use an hd extender or a mvp is because i use autoaspect svti and that wont work on hd extender or mvp.

Works fine for me with my HD Extender.