A thread for Media Portal/software setting performance tips?

[spoco2]

Hi all,

I'm still new to MP, have been playing with trying to get it running smoothly on my rig for a couple of weeks now. As much as I search, almost always the answer to any speed/video playback issue I see is 'Upgrade your video card'.

Now, while I can see that doing so would help those like myself who have a fairly old card in their machine, spending even more money on our rigs is not really an option for a lot of us.

As such it would be very helpful to maybe collect a list of all tweaks and settings that can affect the performance of Media Portal, and perhaps some explanations of some of the settings that aren't clear during the setup process.

I can't really provide any examples as yet, as my setup isn't running great, but I will post to this thread as/if I find fixes for my issues. However, allow me to post some questions to start this off:

What are the uses, and what are the best options for the Movie Player Settings?: I know that VMR9 is the only option now for Video Renderer, but what are the codecs for? Are they purely for DVD playback? If so, why isn't that mentioned on that screen, as it's very confusing as to whether the codec apply across all video playback or not. Do the various Audio rendering options actually make any difference?

FFDShow - What is it?: OK, so in at least version 0.1.3 MP warned you if you tried to run it without ffdshow installed, but now some threads I've read state to not install it as it's more trouble than it's worth. What exactly does it do? The wiki states that turning ffdshow post processing on will improve the playback of video. But does that mean image quality or playback speed or what?

Pros and cons of DirectX exclusive mode for full screen: Now, to avoid tearing on some lower systems such as mine you can turn this on, and it works. But at least on mine it's at the expense of a long, long delay from selecting a video file to view and it actually starting. This delay doesn't exist with the mode turned off. Can the tearing be avoided without this mode? Is there a way to keep this mode but avoid the delay?

Tips for improving the responsiveness of the GUI: I'm having issues with seconds of delay from selecting items in the GUI to something actually happening, making me second guess as to whether I've actually selected something or not. Are there tweaks and settings to help this? From some reading, having the folder.jpg files causes this to some degree, but the images are an integral part of making the whole system feel complete, so removing them is not an option.

I think this thread could be a very, very helpful thread for people if it could gather all the helpful tips and tweaks people know about.

[CHli]

What are the uses, and what are the best options for the Movie Player Settings?

- VMR9 is the way the images are displayed on the screen
- The Codec is used to decode the MPEG2 stream send by the TV-Card to the computer. The codec is an important part because it can be from the best to the worst. (CPU utilization and quality of the decompressed image). In configuration.exe you can choose a codec for TV viewing and one for DVD. I don't know which codec is less cpu consumming. It could be interesting to define this.
-I don't know what is the impact of choosing directsound or not for sound rendering. I have tried both, didn't saw any differences. I would choose Directsound because of the hardware acceleration.


FFDShow - What is it?

FFDShow is a set of filters for windows video processing. So it doesn't do only one thing, it's more a toolbox.

- It contains a set of video codecs, mainly for decoding MPEG4 (divx, xvid)
- It contains a set of sound codecs
- It contains processing filters (smoothing, denoising, cropping, logo removing, that kind of stuff)

Ticking the "Use FFDSHOW post processing" increase you CPU utilization, so you should avoid it I think. But using it as a codec (installing it) is IMHO recommended because you don't need to install codec pack that will probably mess up your computer. (the other way is installing xvid and divx codec separatly)

Pros and cons of DirectX exclusive mode for full screen

I wasn't aware of the fact that Using DX exclusive mode is causing a delay when playing video. I'll try this at home. The fact is that ticking this option should give full priority to MP for using the graphic card, so this should be the best option. Now perhaps there is a bug.

Tips for improving the responsiveness of the GUI

I don't have problem with this (i have folder.jpg everywhere) perhaps simply avoid using huge images.

[spoco2]

CHli Thanks for your reply... I will leave ffdshow turned off, and I think will actually uninstall it too, as I'm quite happy to have installed DivX and XviD plus the AC3 codec for sound.

Vsync Enabling vsync from within the Nvidia control panel made no difference to tearing in video playback, so I've switched back to Exclusive DirectX mode and the video playback/OSD responsiveness is good... if I can just work out what is going on with the GUI responsiveness I'll be happy. (well, that and the hibernation thing).

As for the responsiveness issue, the menus are responsive enough, in that scrolling through the options is fast and everything, it's that there's a delay after selecting an item... it's a killer!

[lgoulart]

Hi all,

I´m using MP RC3 in a dedicated box with the following configuration connected directly to a standart TV through S-Video cable:
- Athlon 64 3000+ (socket 754)
- Gibabyte GA-K8VM800M (mobo)
- 1gb RAM
- 80gb UDMA HDD
- Geforce FX 5500 with 256mb
- Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150

What do you thing is the best software / driver configuration I can get to make MP work smoothly? I´m having some problem on video playback (even if it was recorded within MP) that cause some random parts of the image to become jagged, but they are horizontal lines, usually large ones.

Tks in advance, best regards!

[Teebor]

I'm having the odd stutter watching live tv and when recording and I have found that the problem is directly related to the hard drive in my case.

Perhaps its worth looking at have a 2nd hard drive dedicated to your windows swap file or for MP. Or at worst case replace the HD with a superior quality drive.

Also in my case if I try to use exclusive DirectX mode MP will not work, it doesnt actually display anything on the screen, not even the front menu

[lgoulart]

Originally Posted by Teebor

I'm having the odd stutter watching live tv and when recording and I have found that the problem is directly related to the hard drive in my case.

Perhaps its worth looking at have a 2nd hard drive dedicated to your windows swap file or for MP. Or at worst case replace the HD with a superior quality drive.

Also in my case if I try to use exclusive DirectX mode MP will not work, it doesnt actually display anything on the screen, not even the front menu

I´ve tried the exclusive DirectX mode too but I got a little blinking on the screen when I select, for example, "My TV".

My HD has two partitions, one for Windows and apps (10gb) and a 2nd one for recording material and MP itself (66gb +/-). Reading your post, I was thinking that maybe I should configure the swap file to take place in the largest partition. Do you think that would help?

Best regards!

[spoco2]

My HD has two partitions, one for Windows and apps (10gb) and a 2nd one for recording material and MP itself (66gb +/-). Reading your post, I was thinking that maybe I should configure the swap file to take place in the largest partition. Do you think that would help?

Changing the partition won't have any effect as even though you have two logical drives, it's still the same hard drive underneath, and so you won't get any performance increase as you would from having some things happening on one physical hard drive while other things run on another.

Have you defragged it recently?