Does RC3 give low frames for HD LiveTV? (1 Viewer)

[jba-mp]

I'm a long time Vista MC user (1.5+ years) but finally gave up on Vista's inability to sleep properly. I hope to install Windows XP on my machine and run MediaPortal. So I decided to try RC3 on the Vista install first to see how far MediaPortal had come along. It is an impressive piece of software.

One thing that I wasn't sure about though is that MediaPortal seems to get really low FPS < 11fps average, for any HD livetv channels. Standard Channels get the full 25FPS so they don't stutter at all.

Funny thing is, if I copy a Vista MC recorded HD dv-rms file into the videos folder and play it in MediaPortal it works fine. But try the same HD channel in liveTV and it's stutter city.

My machine is a 2GHz, dual processor with 2Gig ram and am running 2 twinhan DVB-T (ter 3028) PCI cards displayed on a GeForce 8600 GS. I've enabled exclusive directx mode in VRM9 mode on vista (to get rid of tearing) using the Nero Video Decoder (HD) for livetv. I have the TVserver and client on the same machine in the lounge room.

Am now a little scared to install XP + MediaPortal on the machine, lest I end up with stutter HD livetv. Have searched these forums and the google indexes to any references of this particular pattern and I can't seem to find any matches. I'm wondering if I'm just experiencing an issue introduced in recent builds?

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

I've enabled exclusive directx mode in VRM9 mode on vista (to get rid of tearing)

For Vista, this needs to be EVR with Aero enabled (Vista default normally).

Not to sure about the Nero codec, because i would not put any Nero product anywhere near my pc (bloatware+resource hog).

You might want to try SAF as alternative codec

 

[jba-mp]

For Vista, this needs to be EVR with Aero enabled (Vista default normally).

Interesting, I never really thought of it that way. I will try to turn Aero back on and use EVR tonight. As the machine is in the lounge room I have to wait till everyone is done watching on Vista MC. I didn't think turning on windows bloat would help, but will give it a shot.

Also, as I'm considering all of this in order to move off Vista and back to XP, I was kinda hoping the issue woudn't be there in XP. So wanted to avoid using EVR.

 

[Lotsofjazz]

I would avoid going back to XP, because then you loose the advantage of the dual processor. In fact you go over to a single processor environment as one application can use one core at a time.

I have been running mediaportal on my duo core E6600 machine under XP, and going over to Vista Ultimate was a difference like day and night. With Vista it runs a lot smoother and doesnt crash as often as I had wth XP.

Beside that you loose EVR and DirectX10, which are working a lot better with Mediaportal.

And all this only because "Vista doesnt sleep properly"? Seems a trivial priority to me.

 

[jba-mp]

Thanks for the head's up on the single core in xp thing.

"Vista doesn't sleep properly" seems to be a serious issue to me at the moment. The machine just can't reliably go into standby mode. Sometimes it makes it, other times it doesn't. Really reduces the WAF. Perhaps I should look at alternate methods of getting vista to play nice.

 

[5Hundred]

I use Vista with MP's built in powerscheduler and the MPStandbyhandler plugin, no sleep issues at all. I would suggest something specific to your own system is causing sleep issues.

You could try hibernation instead, or disconnecting all mice, keyboards etc to see if one of these devices is causing the problem.

 

[jba-mp]

/me suspects a complete system rebuild with just MediaPortal on is called for.

 

[Lotsofjazz]

Aaaah, the WAF factor, I see ;-)

Vista used to go in hybernation easy on my system (everything powered down), but since one of these windows updates a few months ago, that possibility has gone, I have no idea how that happened and why that has changed. Since then I just power it off and works ok for me.

Lots

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

Vista used to go in hybernation easy on my system (everything powered down), but since one of these windows updates a few months ago, that possibility has gone, I have no idea how that happened and why that has changed. Since then I just power it off and works ok for me.

You should go over to the Greenbutton forum, there are lots of users where standby\hibernate will not work, personally think it hardware related, have seen one of the nvidia components blamed in some cases and i had to revert to a prior driver because of issues with graphics on resume, took a while to go into standby as well (about a minute), so i knew something was not right straight away.

 

[jba-mp]

So it took me a while to figure out how to get Aero back on.
First I needed to change my vista rating (it was 1.0), went up to 4.9, and then I needed to allow the Themes service to start automatically (must have disabled it in my performance tweeking days).

I can confirm that with Aero on, and using EVR I still can't get > 11 fps on a HD channel. I also ran displayed the taks manager while watching this HD channel and got the CPU around 80% utilisation with Media Portal soaking up between 50-60%.

When watching a hd channel in Vista MC I get about 60% utilisation with ehome.exe using about 50-55%.

Definitely looks like it's not a CPU issue, and I updated the nvidia drivers recently. I wonder if it has anything to do with disk access or the container format being used to write the stream out. I have made sure to install timeshifting in a different folder to normal recording (one in a folder of the other).