Fixed my stuttering ... But what a price!

[AzJazz]

First off, I have a pretty decent system:

• Dual core AMD Athlon 64 4400+ CPU
• 2.0 GB RAM
• Dual 8800 GTS GPUs in SLI
• WinXP Pro SP2
• SageTV RC 5.6.8
• SATA Hard Drives galore

Available Codecs:

• PowerDVD8
• nVidia PureVideo

I have been struggling with mini-stutters and problems with jittery action scenes on HD content for a long time now - for as long as I have been running SageTV.

I have tried all combinations of configurations, and have finally found one that plays back with high quality / no stutters / no blurriness on action.

The configuration I use that gives me the best quality playback is:

• Video Renderer = Overlay
• MPEG2 Video Decoder = nVidia PureVideo
• MPEG4 Playback = DirectShow
• Audio Renderer = nVidia Audio
• Audio Decoder = nVidia Audio

Now, the price: When I play back H.264 recorded content (or watch H.264 live content), my CPU usage is around 70% => 80%!

If I use VMR9 for the Video Renderer, my CPU usage drops comfortably down to 8% => 16%, but the video stttuttters again.

Am I scrood?

[TallMomof2]

Do you have hardware acceleration turned on?

[rpmassat]

I also use PowerDVD8 and had stuttering until I added the SageTV demux beta which is posted here:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=35467

Have you tried this?

[Motofreak75]

increasing the numbuffer value in the registry from 40 to 100 or 110, this will remove the h.264 skipping when using sage software to playback h.264 content. this happens when using a hardware acceleration enabled decoder.


if you searched for h.264 playback skipping you will find this and a few other tweaks to help your issue out.

[AzJazz]

Originally Posted by TallMomof2

Do you have hardware acceleration turned on?

TallMomof2 - Yes, I do! (Sorry ... I didn't spot your name earlier)

Originally Posted by Motofreak75

increasing the numbuffer value in the registry from 40 to 100 or 110, this will remove the h.264 skipping when using sage software to playback h.264 content. this happens when using a hardware acceleration enabled decoder.

if you searched for h.264 playback skipping you will find this and a few other tweaks to help your issue out.

Thanks, Motofreak -

I actually did this a while ago (actually, after every time I reinstall SageTV). My current registry settings are NumBuffers=0x00000100 and BufferSize=0x00020000.

These registry changes converted the H.264 playback from totally unwatchable (approx. 1 frame a second) to the current state, where there are annoying jumps in the playback & poor handling of motion.

Originally Posted by rpmassat

I also use PowerDVD8 and had stuttering until I added the SageTV demux beta which is posted here:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=35467

Have you tried this?

rpmassat - I tried your suggestion, and also tried the newest MpegDemux.ax that was supposed to be used in the official 6.5 release (but it had issues, and was removed for this release). Neither of the updated MpegDemux.ax files fixed the stuttering problem.

[Razillian]

Just a stab in the dark here, but have you tried playback with only one video card(disabling SLI and removing the second video card)?

Every nVidia driver update has some "fixed SLI support with XXXX card in XXXXX application" bug fix listed, so it might be possible that the purevideo implementation of hardware accelleration does not play well with SLI and multiple GPUs.

[darkmar]

In a similar quest for stuttering h.264 free content I spent endless hours of experimenting. I have concluded that Powerdvd 8 might not be the best codec for hd-pvr content and especially in XP environment unless using overlay (no acceleration).
The best result I was able to achieve by using EVR in Vista and using Arcsoft codec. An additional tuning is required with all mentioned above adjustments and the latest MpegDemux.ax.

[mistergq]

I use Arcsoft codecs on a SINGLE core P4 3.0 GHz. Works great.