SageTVService/svchost.exe conflict?

[oceanfront]

I'm having a problem using SageTV on Vista for playback of recorded shows.

I'm watching the disk activity in Resource Monitor (from Task Manager). When the playback becomes jerky, plays in slow-motion, or the audio is stuttering, i notice that two process are both trying to access the same video file and that whenever svchost is running, it's reading the file at a rate that causes the jerky playback.

svchost.exe 600,000,000 + B/min
SageTVService 30,000,000 B/min

When the playback first starts, or when it has not yet started stuttering, svchost is not accessing the file. As soon as it starts accessing the file, i get the problem.

Any ideas how to stop this or reduce the impact? I've turned off virus protection and I still get the same problem. I can't think of anything else that would be causing this.

[oceanfront]

Okay, think i found it. It's the windows Superfetch service.

It's loading frequently used programs and files into memory. I've disabled the Superfetch service for now, and SageTV is behaving properly, but I'll need to see what kind of performance hit the rest of my system takes from not using this.

[r00st3r]

Thanks for that tip. The superfetch was writing like mad to the hard drive and my video was stuttering like crazy. I turned it off and my HD light isn't ferociously blinking at me and video is smooth. I thought it was comskip....good thing it wasn't.