HD playback is randomly jumpy?

[opy01]

I posted this in an existing thread as to not start another one but I guess it was not the same issue so here is goes in a new thread. I am looking for suggestions.

My setup is: Intel Core 2 6600 @ 2.4GHz each core, 2GB RAM, GForce 8600GTS, Creative Labs X-FI sound card, WinTV-PVR-500 with add-on port, WinTV-HVR-1600, 1 SATA Hard drive for Vista and software, 2 SATA hard drives on a 400Gig RAID for Sage video storage, 1 SATA hard drive for virtual memory, and 1 2Gig memory stick for readyboost.

I recorded 3 shows in this week on my WinTV-HVR-1600 hooked up to an antena on my roof. the shows were Heros, Terminator and House all at seperate times with nothing else recording. All of them were in HD recorded as Best in the series settings. They all recorded fine. Monday I watched Heros as it was being recorded and it did not have any problems. I paused it once or twice then FF during the next commercial break.

Tuesday I watched Terminator and House (tv shows) while nothing else was being recorded and randomely it would start skipping real bad. The hard drive light would be solid red and I stopped the show until the light stopped flashing then started the show again and it was fine for about 10 minutes then started stuttering again and the hard drive light would be solid again. The recording was fine because I could rewind a little and the part that was previously skipping plays smooth.

Since I am running Vista I can pull up the recource monitor and it said SageTVService.exe was running the tv show and reading from the hard drive at 1,500,000,000 B/Min. When I stop the show it goes away after about a minute. I restart the show and it stays around 100,000,000 B/Min for a while then for some unknown reason jumps up again. The processor stays around 25-50% and the memory is about 50%.

I am monitoring Heros now and the hard drive has not gone over 500,000,000 B/Min. The file size of Heros in about 12Gigs and Terminator was about 6Gigs. I would think if it was the file size then Heros would do the same thing since it was 2 hours and twice the size.

I have gone through and disabled almost all security, set the processor to 100% in power management, turned off indexing, added ready boost, and done several other things to boost performance in Vista when I first set it up. I am planning on going with a striped RAID with 4 hard drives and that should speed up the read time. Any suggestions until then would be great. I have tried to be as specific as possible to help get ideas and eliminate people telling me to do something that I already have done.

[Opus4]

Here's my generic stuttering suggestions: make sure the recording drives are formatted using 64K clusters, make sure no antivirus app automatically scans files in the recording dirs, and try disabling superfetch in Vista.

- Andy

[opy01]

Thanks for the reply. I just disabled superfetch. I actually found a 10 step guide for increasing perfomance but that wasnt in there. Thanks for pointing that out to me. Other than that I have 64k clusters and no AV at all on that machine since it does not surf the web or anything. The only thing it uses the web for is logmein.com, windows updates and tv guide updates. I found a few other services that I disabled so I hope it works better now. Is there anything else I should look for? Would more memory help? I was thinking of going up to 8 Gigs before I redo my RAID.

oh and the only software I have is Sage, Creative Labs, Nvidea, Dirmon and the few other things like java and codecs and stuff.

[alfi33]

I think I am having a very similar issue. I seem to have no problem at all with Live TV....ONLY with previously recorded digital OTA.

I tried this registry tweak that someone suggested in this forum:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Frey Technologies\Common\DSFilters\MpegDeMux.

Reset the values for the following two entries:
"NumBuffers" set to hex 00000200
"BufferSize" set to hex 00020000

I initially thought this tweak had completely fixed the problem. I watched a couple of shows that I had recorded and the stuttering (kind of like a slow motion effect) was gone. However, last night I tried to record two shows while watching a show that I had previously recorded and the stuttering returned about half way into a 2 hour show. I feel this tweak has gotten me closer, but not quite there yet.