Is there a "best practices" for stutter-free playback of H.264 files

[wayner]

I get a minor amount of stutter on playback of H.264 files that is really only noticable on fast actions shows such as sports. When I do a search for stutter on these forums you get all sorts of disparate threads - can someone point me at one specific thread that has the best advice? Should we be building a FAQ or wiki on this - or is there one?

Should we expect this issue to go away once EVR is working properly?

FYI - my system is an E8400 running Vista HP. My graphics card is a HD3850.

[reggie14]

I'd be interested in seeing more information about this too. I've had problems with H.264 files in general using Sage. In my case I don't have such a problem with stuttering, but rather getting Sage to use the same decoders and splitters as WMP (without crashing one of them).

[wammer23]

I too had the stuttering problem on a machine with considerable processing power. No matter what I tried I coulnd't get rid of it (using Hauppauge HD PVR).

The solution in my situation was to change the h.264 codec to the ffdshow video decoder. After the change the stuttering went away and my cpu's utilization went from ~90% to ~65%.

what codec are you using?

hope this helps,

wes

edit: I am using the latest beta version of Sage.

[reggie14]

ffdshow gives me audio sync problems. I don't think it deals with variable frame rate files very well. Cyberlink's H.264 codec (from PowerDVD 7) crashes or freezes up on me a lot. I haven't tried PowerDVD 8. CoreAVC works great in WMP, but for some reason it doesn't work so well with Sage. I just noticed there's a new version. I think it's at least partially the codec's fault. Updating to v1.8.0 hosed H.264 playback in Sage. Maybe v1.8.5 fixed it.

[jerryt]

Just a reminder that the following registry hack in Sage is very important for h.264 files.

"I went from choppy to smooth by changing some registry settings.

HKey_L_M\SOFTWARE\Frey Technologies\Common\DSFilters\MpegDeMux values NumBuffers and BufferSize.
I currently have these set to 100 and 20000 hex, respectively.

(Up from 40 and 10000)"

This needs to be re-applied after any upgrades of Sage.

[reggie14]

For what it's worth, upgrading to CoreAVC 1.8.5 fixed the problems I was having.

[Taddeusz]

I recently did a clean install of the client on my main machine.

Ok, here is what I did. I am using the PowerDVD 8 codecs. I first used DSF Manager and Graph Edit to modify the merits of my filters so that the Cyberlink H.264 Decoder and AC3Filter would be chosen automatically as the default filters (You'll have to reboot between changes).

Installed the beta mpeg splitter. I then modified the buffer settings as outlined previously. Then changed always_use_dshow_player in the properties to "true". You also have to go down and remove the Arcsoft decoder from being the default H.264 filter (this one tripped me out because I hadn't specified it, it is there by default). Turn on 3D and VMR9 and leave FSE off. Make sure to set MPEG 4 playback to DirectShow. Set MPEG 2 filter to Cyberlink 8, audio filter to AC3Flter and the audio renderer to Default WaveOut Device.

My reason for going with the audio settings that I did was because I was not getting sound unless I specified "Default WaveOut Device" as the audio renderer. With this set I would not get audio with some of the filters. Arcsoft would give me audio but would crash SageTV when video playback stopped. I finally settled on AC3Filter for a crash-free experience.

I get stutter-free playback on my machine in my sig.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by wammer23

The solution in my situation was to change the h.264 codec to the ffdshow video decoder. After the change the stuttering went away and my cpu's utilization went from ~90% to ~65%.

I assume that this is done by editing the videoframe/h264_video_decoder_filter= line in sage.properties, correct? Is so, what do you put in that line for ffdshow and for coreavc so that I can try them out? It's not like you can pick these from a list - I am assuming that you need the exact name, correct?

And if I am going to go with CoreAVC then what edition do you need - Standard or Professional?

[wammer23]

videoframe/h264_video_decoder_filter=ffdshow Video Decoder

not sure about the other one.