video freezes every 5 seconds for ~2seconds

[lovingHDTV]

Hi All,
I'm trying to help my brother-in-law get his SageTV box up and running. We are seeing the video freeze for a 2 second period every 5 seconds or so. I can watch the process window in XP and see the cpu utilization ~50% while the video is playing, then drop to 0% when the video freezes. The video is being saved this was I believe because I can rewind the video and it freezes at the same spot. This happens using overlay and VMR.

He is running XP pro, PVR250 model16 card. I have the 1.18 drivers installed, the latest available on the web, they came on the CD with the card. Running SageTV only with the 1 card.

One strange thing. This is an HP Pravilion system re-built with XP Pro. I have noticed that all PCI devices share IRQ 9, this is the AGP, network, Creative Live, USB host controller. IRQ 7, 10, and 11 are not used at all. Any ideas how to get this changed?


Help

[carmat3]

What kind of hard drive or drives do you have? What are the specs of system, video card.

[mls]

Originally posted by lovingHDTV

He is running XP pro, PVR250 model16 card. I have the 1.18 drivers installed, the latest available on the web, they came on the CD with the card. Running SageTV only with the 1 card.

One strange thing. This is an HP Pravilion system re-built with XP Pro. I have noticed that all PCI devices share IRQ 9, this is the AGP, network, Creative Live, USB host controller. IRQ 7, 10, and 11 are not used at all. Any ideas how to get this changed?

I have noticed that things like network cards, Creative sound cards, and USB controllers tend to jump onto IRQ 9 if it is available. Video cards tend to often jump onto 11.

However, you say 7, 10, and 11 are not being used, so that makes me wonder about how things may be set up in the BIOS.

If the BIOS is set to use a "Plug 'n' Play" OS, then it should be letting Windows decide which IRQ's (it thinks are best) to use for devices. You could maybe try to "force" them to other IRQ's thru Device Manager, but that may cause other problems.

If you do not have uses for the Serial ports or a Parellel printer port, you could change the settings in the BIOS to free up IRQ's 3, 4, and 7 (and somtimes 9), but since you say the system is already not using the IRQ's that are already free I doubt that would help any.

Can't say I've ever ran into a system that don't use any free IRQ's for something now these days, so ya got me baffled on that. Sorry.

[lovingHDTV]

I've tried several things.

1. I checked the driver version in the device manager and even thought the CD says the driver is 1.8 the device manager reports 1.7

2. On the HP I started the system and did not load the drivers. This put the 250 with the yellow question mark in the device manager on IRQ 10, then when I installed the drivers I saw the device change to IRQ 9. I've not found a way to turn off ACPI for XP install so I cannot control the IRQs.

3. If I set the record rate to 1GB/hr the pauses are much smaller and less frequent. The HDD light barely flickers, but I still get freezes.

4. I put the HDD, video card and SBLive card in a different computer and reinstalled. Same exact freezing, with 1GB less than 2GB.

5. I formated a second partition to 64KB sectors, made no difference.

I'm out of ideas, looks like he may have to buy a new computer to get this to run. I'm not really sure why, as I have my Sage box on a 933 PIII system and it works great.

In the new computer I do get different IRQs for each device, but it made no difference. I don't think this is an IRQ sharing problem as they are very long freezes 2-3sec, not just stuttering.

All ideas welcome

thanks,

P.S. graphics card in a NVIDIA TNT2 Vanta

[lovingHDTV]

One more thing. When the video freezes, the sound is still fine. This strictly a video issue.

[carmat3]

Hummor me and run HDtach and tell us how fast the disk drive is. Reason I say this is because I had a simmilar problem and it's becuse I had settings in the bios all wrong so both of my drives were really slow. My average read speed was about 2.2mb/sec. After I fixed the problem, everything is smooth, my drives are now 80 to 90 mb/sec. Make sure you test in the original machine.

http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public...request=HdTach

My not be the solution, but take a shot. I wen through hell swapping parts reinstalling os, other software etc, and many other things, to find out it was as easy as changing a setting in the bios. Like I said my problem was very simmilar.

[mls]

The last machine I built should have been super fast (with a Pentium 4 - 3.0Ghz CPU and PC-3200 DDR RAM in dual channel mode). However, after I got it all together with XP installed it ran slower than my Celeron 2.6Ghz machine.

Ran a few tests and found out the hard drive access was extremely slow.

This machine had AMI BIOS (which I was not all to familiar with all of its little tricks). I later found a setting hiding under the hard drive selection area for enabling 32 bit transfer.

After enabling that, things ran much faster (and smoother). I have no idea why any new machines BIOS would default to 16 transfer mode since that would only be needed for some very old hard drives.

You might have something similar going on with the settings in your BIOS. If you have the manual for the motherboard, it might be worth looking thru all the BIOS options. Maybe you'll spot something there that could be tweaked for better performance like I did.

[lovingHDTV]

Those are two good ideas. I'll pass them along. However, as I was only visiting him for the weekend we just went out a bought a new mainboard, 2200 barton, 256 MB ddr3200. We used the same hard drive and cd drives and it works great. This could mean that exactly what you said is the issue, where the bios was running the HD oddly. I'll have him check that anyway for my own sake.

thanks for the suggestions.