Playback Issue With New Setup

[Goodspike]

I'm having an issue on my new HTPC, where Sage will suddenly start not playing back properly--servere stuttering, but it's not recording related. It starts at randon times, like 20 or 50 minutes into an hour program. Closing out of Sage won't help for long, but I can watch some other recorded programming okay. But once it does go away I can watch the same material just fine.

I've tried every audio/video codec/FSE/Overlay, etc. combination possible, and I can't figure out the cause.

Ideas?

BTW, this is one of those HP slimline machines with an NVidia 8500 GS card.

[gplasky]

Make sure you don't have anti virus or some other program scheduled to scan the drives. You'll need to exclude the Sage directories.

Gerry

[Goodspike]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Make sure you don't have anti virus or some other program scheduled to scan the drives. You'll need to exclude the Sage directories.

Gerry

No anti-virus at all, and when I check Task Manager nothing seems to be running.

Also, other programs will play fine!

[Djc208]

Check video drivers and settings. My playback issues with my old nVidia 6200LE card were all driver related. Newer drivers actually made it worse. The 7600 that's in there now however works fine with the latest drivers.

[Goodspike]

I'm going to bump this to see if anyone has any other ideas.

Since posting I've tried changing the power management settings, increasing the swap file settings, reverting back to the Java version that comes with Sage.

What's odd is how random this problem is. You can be watching a show for 80 minutes and it will start, or you can be watching a show for 5 minutes. And again, it just seems to be a playback issue, not a recording issue. If you REW 15 seconds, it can play 30 seconds past where the stuttering started.

[Taddeusz]

What OS are you running? As far as playback goes if you're running Vista you should set it to VMR9 with FSE turned OFF. FSE screws with Vista. If you run in Overlay mode it will disable Aero.

The only time I've personally run into a problem like this is when my server is recording 3 or 4 programs at the same time and also have Show Analyzer processing one program. I think there's just so much disk activity going on that I get latency issues on the drives. In particular a single drive because it's larger and gets hit more often with the recordings. I've since changed things around like turning off intelligent recording so it's not recording so much extra stuff. I think I'm also going to add a separate OS drive eventually.

But... that is the only time I've run into the problem you've described.

[Goodspike]

I'll try FSE off. I do was using VMR9, but it was the same with Overlay (and I did turn Aero off).

BTW, I did notice that my system allocates 756 (or so) MB of memory as shared video. Is there any way to change that, or does it matter?

Oh, and I only have two tuners, but it doesn't seem related to recording activity.

[Goodspike]

My wife seems to think this is related to FF/REW activity, and I'm beginning to agree, although if it is, it doesn't always start right after a FF/REW.

Last night we were watching one program, it started the issue, we switched to another program. Watched the second program without issue. Went back to the first and were okay until I backed up to catch something I missed.

But I noticed a couple of other things. Once I FF'd and it went backwards, and at the end it seemed like it ran out of material before it ran out of time on the timebar. I'm wondering if it's an issue with QAM and whatever indicates time? But that doesn't explain why the same file can be good and bad at the same place.