Need insight on cpu pegging on virgin XP/Sage install - Brain turning to mush

[Hector]

Greetings all-

I'm having a tough problem I'm hoping to get some insight on. Tough for me at least. Basically my cpu is getting pegged on digital 1080/720 OTA (A180) content only and the recordings are corrupted. Not sure which one is causing the other or whether both are the result of something else. Stuff recorded on my trusty old pvr-350 seems fine. Doesn't need to be in HD, seems to be worse on 1080 channels tho.

I had the exact same cards/drives in an AMD 2800/512 meg and it ran perfectly. VMR9/FSE was rock solid. I had the chance to get a AMD64 3500 cpu at a good deal so I bought a new Gigabyte Nvidia3 motherboard (needed AGP) and a gig of corsair ram. As you can imagine when the old XP install saw the new board/cpu tons of new drivers were needed so ultimately I just figured that something stepped on something else. I'll spare you the long version of everything I thought of and tried previously because it finally got to the point where I just created a virgin Sage install on a virgin XP installation.

The only things installed for this test install-

XP SP2 with all updates

A180 drivers (no software)

Via sound card drivers

Virgin Sage install (no data migrated for the test).

Test Box-

AMD64/3500/1 gig

6600GT

Avermedia A180

Chaintech sound card.

And still every time I tune to a digital station it pegs my cpu (90% actually). This isn't even full screen but a small window. And if I tune to a sub channel then not. So it seems to on 1080/720 content so my first thought was the agp aperture was too low but that seems to have no effect. Neither does setting the bios agp slot to auto, 4x or 8x.


What I am reasonably sure it's not-

Fragmented drive - the drive was formatted for the install

IRQ conflict - who knows for sure but I swapped the cards around enough to be sure my 6600gt was not on the same irq as the A180. They're both on their own IRQ.

Something running in the background - there is nothing running. No virus software installed on test box etc.

AGP aperture - When this occurred to me I thought I had it. The aperture was set by default to 32 so I was sure this was it. But it made little to no difference at either 64 on up.

Codec issue- The only codecs on the test install are the Sage ones. Using overlay to eliminate as much as possible.

What I'm seeing-

The cpu pegging is not Sage related. It happens with every player.

WatchHDTV (viewing not recording) seems to work fine until I try to record something then it just crashes

When recording with Sage and NOT watching there is no cpu pegging.

When playing with Sage and watching with a process tool the offending thread is mpegdemux.ax.

However whether you're watching live and the cpu pegs or in the background when it doesn't EITHER WAY it seems the mpeg is a corrupt file. I can't play it on my other box either.

The only HD type files I have that were not recorded with my A180 are the Divco demos. They are .tp files but they do not peg the cpu.

The sub-channels do NOT peg the CPU at all, but the files still seem corrupt.

I've just removed the A180 and of course I cannot tune channels but old HD recordings made on the old motherboard peg the CPU. The next step I guess is to swap out the 6600gt. Everything played well together before so the new mb/cpu/drivers/bios would seem to be the factor. A friend is bringing over an old GeForce 5200 so at least I can try something else in the AGP slot. Hard to imagine a gigabyte Nvidia 6600gt not playing well with a Gigabyte motherboard with Nvidia Nforce but who knows.

Is there anything either in software or the bios that would effect the ability of an AGP 6600gt other than the AGP aperture and the flexible AGP rate (auto/4x/8x). Something in forceware perhaps?

Any ideas would be appreciated. I've been chasing this issue for a week and my brains turning to mush. Maybe I am just missing something simple. I can create a short mpeg if someone that knows more about file structure is interested in looking at it.

Thanks in advance for any insight.

peace . . .

[stanger89]

You'll want to look into some better decoders, download the nVidia trail and give them a try. Be sure to enable hardware accelleration.

[Hector]

So do you find that kind of intelligence to be a burden in your day to day dealings with mortals?

It just goes to show how easy it is to fool yourself (or rather how easy it is for me to fool myself). What got me was that I have Purevideo and it was on the install that was munged up in the first place. I didn't go into all the details but on that install I spent two days reinstalling every single codec and driver desperately trying to get out of a windows reinstall. So something was definitely wrong with it and considering it went from one cpu/mb to another that's not so hard to believe.

But when I set up the new box and the same process pegged the cpu I just assumed I had the problem contained in the limited hardware/software I had on the box. In my defense I didn't realize the Sage decoder was going to peg the cpu like that so I just assumed (and there you have it) that it was the same thing.

So thanks man. Like a lot of folks I owe you one.

peace . . .

Originally Posted by stanger89

You'll want to look into some better decoders, download the nVidia trail and give them a try. Be sure to enable hardware accelleration.