Stuttery OTA HD recording playback while recording

[alfi33]

Anyone have any idea why I would experience stuttery playback (kind of a slow motion effect) of OTA HD recordings? This seems to only happen if I'm recording something while watching a previously recorded show. It also never occurs when watching Live TV.

I have low CPU usage. No anti-virus. Hard drive is formated with 64k clusters. The drive does appear to be working really hard when this is happening based on the little hard drive access light. Pausing/Rewinding sometimes makes the problem go away briefly. I've tried defragging but it made no difference.

I used to have stuttery playback of all recorded shows (whether or not I was recording something). I did the "Numbuffer" registry tweak and that seemed to help a great deal. Stutter-free playback.....unless I'm also recording something at the time. It doesn't occur immediately....sometimes it won't happen until 30 to 60 mins into a recording.

It seems odd to me that this would only happen when watching previously recorded shows. Because of this, I would not think this would be a decoder issue. Am I wrong? Any ideas what I should be looking at as a possible cause?


My system:
GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard
ATI HD3200 integrated graphics with Catalyst 8.9 drivers
Athlon64 X2 5000+
2 GB RAM
160 GB SATA for OS
500 GB SATA formated with 64k clusters (for recordings)
Hauppauge HVR-1600
Hauppauge HVR-1800

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XP Pro SP3
SageTV V6.3.10.166

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Overlay
InterVideo NonCSS Video Decoder for Hauppauge

[Polypro]

Catylist 8.9 is horrible according to the guys on AVS...has this happened with all versions of Catylist?

You're not on Vista, so my next suggestion wouldn't apply.

Are you absolutely positve it's not OTA signal related? (I have great signal strength 99% of the time, but it'll drop to 0 a few times during a 1 hour recording, causing stutter and pixelization for a second or two).

Are your drives running UDMA 5 or 6 in device manager?

Try a different decoder and see (If it's Nvidia, set it to "Automatic", "Smart" is buggy on XP).

P

[jerryt]

Run HDtach on that 500g hard drive.

You would be amazed at the difference between brands of hard drives. Some are twice as fast and some are failing.

[alfi33]

Originally Posted by Polypro

Catylist 8.9 is horrible according to the guys on AVS...has this happened with all versions of Catylist?

You're not on Vista, so my next suggestion wouldn't apply.

Are you absolutely positve it's not OTA signal related? (I have great signal strength 99% of the time, but it'll drop to 0 a few times during a 1 hour recording, causing stutter and pixelization for a second or two).

Are your drives running UDMA 5 or 6 in device manager?

Try a different decoder and see (If it's Nvidia, set it to "Automatic", "Smart" is buggy on XP).

P

I've tried Catalyst 8.7 and 8.8. I had the same problem with 8.7 and could not even boot with 8.8 (which seems to be a common problem with others trying 8.8 on this board with XP).

I don't think it's a signal strength problem because I can rewind and it will play fine over the same spot. Also, Live TV is fine.....which really confuses me cause everything Sage plays is a recording, right?

I have two SATA hard drives...one for the OS and a 500GB for recordings only.
The first "Primary IDE Channel" says it is in Ultra DMA Mode 2.
The second "Primary IDE Channel" says that it is in Ultra DMA Mode 6. Should the first one be 5?

I've tried a Cyberlink decoder that came with PowerDVD 7 and the ATI Avivo decoder. Both gave the same results. Is the decoder in PowerDVD 8 better/different? I have not tried any Nvidia decoders so maybe I should give PureVideo a try. I just don't understand how it can be a decoder problem if Live TV plays fine.

Originally Posted by jerryt

Run HDtach on that 500g hard drive.

You would be amazed at the difference between brands of hard drives. Some are twice as fast and some are failing.

I thought that the drive might be failing too. I've run HDTach and it seems to test out were it should. I wish it wouldn't so I would know what to do.

Random Access Time: 17.9ms
CPU Utilization: 4%
Average read: 66.3 MB/s
Burst speed: 244.5 MB/s

[chuck2]

try different decoders, im using the intervideo noncss hauppage one, and its less choppy

[Polypro]

UDMA 2? Are you sure you weren't looking at the CD drive? Primary and secondary each have 2 channels, If you have 2 HD's and an optical drive, you should have 3 listings. If it *is* a HD at 2...yeah, that's a problem.

P

[alfi33]

Originally Posted by chuck2

try different decoders, im using the intervideo noncss hauppage one, and its less choppy

I think I might try a trial of PureVideo or PowerDVD8. So far Intervideo NonCSS Hauppauge has been far better for me than ATI Avivo or Cyberlink's decoder with PowerDVD7.

But if it was a decoder issue, wouldn't I have the same problem with Live TV?

[alfi33]

Originally Posted by Polypro

UDMA 2? Are you sure you weren't looking at the CD drive? Primary and secondary each have 2 channels, If you have 2 HD's and an optical drive, you should have 3 listings. If it *is* a HD at 2...yeah, that's a problem.

P

You're right. I do have two HD's and one DVD drive. So I must have been looking at the DVD drive.

At this point, I guess I'm thinking I will play musical decoders (because it won't cost me anything to use trial versions). I think I'll also get rid of Catalyst 8.9 and go back to 8.7 or something prior. The whole system has seemed a bit unstable ever since I upgraded to 8.9.

Then maybe try a different hard drive or a discreet video card.

Other ideas are welcomed....

[alfi33]

Well, I got this resolved (sort of) but I'm not entirely certain how.

I made 3 changes (dumb, I know):
1. I upgraded to the current version of SageTV (6.4.8).
2. I upgraded my video drivers to Catalyst 8.10.
3. I disabled Comskip....it was running full time in "play nice" mode.

After making these changes, my hard drive has seemed to not have to work nearly as hard when watching a previous recording while recording something else and all stuttering went away.

I have a feeling that Comskip is the culprit. I plan on re-enabling it to find out. I would have thought my system specs would have been up to running it at least in low priority mode full time.

[snipeman]

Comskip was the culprit for me, I run it on a different computer now. Even then, sometimes it makes enough hard drive access on my Sage server that I get a little skipping. I relegated Comskip to 2AM - 4PM times and I have no troubles now.

I plan on buying a faster hard drive eventually.