HD Stuttering when watching Sports

[djseto]

I've been running SageTV for 6 months now. I have not had any HD stuttering issues until now. Whenever I watch HD Sports, it stutters so bad on the video that its almost impossible to watch. I record HD Shows on ABC all the time but today I recorded NBA Basketball and when I play it back, it stutters like crazy. Is there something about the way live sports is broadcast that is causing this? If this were happening all the time, I would point it to hardware, but its only when I try to watch HD basketball on ABC. I've tried every combination of NVidia Pure Video settings and that didnt help.

[djseto]

Anyone? Bueller?

[jerryt]

Overlay?
VMR9?
Any rescent software installs?
Is the recording drive formated for 64 bit blocks?
What back gound processes do you have running?
What Video card?
What amount of memory?
What processor?
What OS?

You could enable Debugging and the text file will show what directshow filters are in use.

I would back up sage and try a clean install, very quick and easy first step.

[djseto]

Originally Posted by jerryt

Overlay? -- Yes

VMR9? -- No

Any rescent software installs? -- No

Is the recording drive formated for 64 bit blocks? -- Yes

What back gound processes do you have running? -- varies, but very little as this is a dedicated machine

What Video card? -- Nvidia GeForce 6150 256MB (integrated with motherboard)

What amount of memory? -- 1GB total, 256 dedicated to Video

What processor? -- AMD Athalon x2 64bit

What OS? -- Windows XP (32 bit)

See above. As I said, this only happens when watching Sports, specifically NBA ball on ABC HD. Anything else I watch or record on that channel is fine. If it were system wide, I would do a clean re-install, but that is my last choice at this point. I am running Sage 6.3.5. I tried 6.3.10 a few months back and it would randomly crash on me without warning.

[jerryt]

Control-alt-delete to bring up the Windows task manager.

Click performance tab, Note under "Physical Memory" what number you have for "Available" while you are tuning the stuttering channel. Also note CPU usage as a percentage on the same page. And lastly note the number of processes showing in the bottom left corner.

[evilpenguin]

I had the same problem with 1080i football with a 6600. Once I upgraded to an 8600 everything was smooth as silk.

[mikel]

Certain broadcasts can have much higher bitrates. I recall reading that sports has lots of motion, so they generally turn up the bitrate really high. This can also vary from station to station. It could be that your onboard video can't handle this much higher bitrate.

[djseto]

Hmm. I never had this problem what I was running MythTV on Ubuntu Linux. Video cards are pretty cheap now, so I am thinking about getting a card. I just need to get what I need vs. overkill. I've been out of the Video Card market for a while, so I don't know whats good and whats not.

[jhkoenig]

My experience matches EvilPenguin's exactly. Football and basketball were impossible to watch without motion-sickness pills on my lower-end video card. In the S.F. area, CBS was the worst, since they're broadcasting in 1080i instead of 720, but it was "degrees of bad". I bought an 8600GTS and wow! everything is smooth as silk.

[jerryt]

Another vote for 8600GTS

[djseto]

I got my HD Extender and I had no playback problems so I went out and bought a ATI Radeon 3650. A family member was part of the team that designed that chip, so I felt somewhat obliged to get an ATI over an NVIDIA. The problem has definitely gone away. When I playback or watch Standard TV now, it shows up 4:3 with pillar boxes. Changing the aspect ratio / overscan settings affects the image within the black bars, but the black bars themselves don't adjust. I'm sure its an ATI MPEG decoder thing I need to figure out. If I change the MPEG2 decoder to the SageTV one, then my aspect ratio settings work, BUT the deinterlacing is crappy.

[shugrue]

I've been having trouble with HD files periodically.
I suspected that the files where large and were scattered around the harddrive in fragments because of continued hd activity over time.
I was right.
To test for this problem on your machine move the problem mpeg file to an empty folder on an empty partition. And then play it back.
If it plays fine then the files was too fragmented.

[djseto]

I have defrag set in windows to auto run every other day at 4am. I had this problem with live TV as well

[thestig]

I got my HD Extender and I had no playback problems so I went out and bought a ATI Radeon 3650.

I would return the 3650 and get another HD extender, running the Sage server headless.

I have defrag set in windows to auto run every other day at 4am. I had this problem with live TV as well

It's good to defrag the OS filesystem, but haven't seen any benefit of doing so in the recording filesystem. As long as it has been formated with 64K blocks as you have.

[djseto]

Running it headless isnt an option based on other things I use the HTPC for..the video card was $60.

A defrag analysis showed my recording drive as 60% defragmented, even with 64k clusters. I figure a weekly defrag is a good thing regardless