SageTV at 40-50% with MPEG-2 Decoder Video Card

[SkierHiker]

Is it normal for SageTV to run at 40-50% CPU when playing back a recording via the TV-Out with a NVIDIA 8400 video card? The video card supposedly has MPEG-2 decoding on-board so the CPU load should be about nill? I have Comskip on, maybe that's doing some work? What else would SageTV be doing? My computer is an old Dell 1.8 ghz with 2 gb memory.

Thanks - Mark.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by SkierHiker

I have Comskip on, maybe that's doing some work?

Seems like it would be easy to test that theory by turning Comskip off.

Whether or not your card's hardware decoder is used may depend on what drivers you have installed, which decoder you have selected in SageTV, whether 3D acceleration and/or DXVA are turned on, what kind of content you're testing with (HD v. SD, MPEG2 v. h264), etc.

[freedml]

Turning off Comskip will help, but I also found that Comskip Monitor uses a lot of cpu time but doesn't show up as a separate process. Turn it off, too. I haven't tried it but I've been told that Dirmon2 is a better way to run Comskip automatically.

[SkierHiker]

I turned off Comskip and it didn't really change anything. I'm running DirMon and ShowAnalyzer on another computer so that has no affect. Playing with it some more and I'm seeing my CPU jump as high as 60-70%.

I'm wondering now if my video card is actually doing the MPEG-2 decoding. There doesn't seem to be anywhere in SageTV setup to tell it to do hardware decoding like it has for the PVR-350. Am I missing something? Any ideas on how to tell if the card is decoding?

[freedml]

Did you stop loading 'comskip monitor' -- it's a problem also, not just comskip itself.

[SkierHiker]

Originally Posted by freedml

Did you stop loading 'comskip monitor' -- it's a problem also, not just comskip itself.

I don't use Comskip Monitor. I use ShowAnalyzer/DirMon2 on another computer. On the SageTV computer, I use the comskip playback import which I have turned off and on with no visible difference. Still running 50-70%CPU.

[AWS]

What CPU usage do you get when you use:
1.) Overlay
2.) VMR7
3.) VMR9
or if you're using Vista, 4.) EVR

I get about the same CPU utilization as what you mentioned when I use VMR9. If I drop down to Overlay I get 4% usage. I'm using an 8600GTS.

AWS

[sdsean]

Make sure you've got the latest drivers, and if need be go force the decoders SageTV setup.

If you are still having a problem, use graph edit and you can figure out which codec SageTV is using.

Its almost always a codec issue (or combo driver/codec issue), at least on most modern hardware.