Frame drops in full screen but not in window mode (1 Viewer)

[sekach]

I got stuck when trying to fix frame drops during watching live HD tv. There are about half of frames dropped (as reported thru Shift+F1).

Trying to nail down the issue I recorded a couple of minutes of tv and then played it back in MP. There are still frame drops when trying to play the recording in full screen mode. If I start MP in window mode, there are no drops, If I then increase window size to be near full screen, I see the drops again.

I tried both EVR/VMR9, Microsoft and CoreAVC codecs. There are no drops when playing 1080p video.

When I play recorded file in windows media player, the picture is perfect.
It has something to do with codecs configuration, but I don't understand why windows encoder works fine in windows media player, but not in Media Portal. I did validate with graphstudio that Microsoft Video Decoder is being used in media portal.

Any ideas? Thanks!
Is it indication that my integrated AVI built in card is not powerful enough?

MediaPortal Version: 1.1.2
MediaPortal Skin: default
Windows Version: win 7 ultimate
CPU Type: amd athlon II x2 245
HDD: WD7500AACS
Memory: 2Gb DDR2
Motherboard: MSI 785 E45
Video Card: built in Radeon 4200
Video Card Driver: Catalyst 10.12
1. TV Card: TT 3200
1. TV Card Type: dvb-s
TV: Samsung LE46A686
TV - HTPC Connection: HDMI

 

[lhcomputer]

AW: Frame drops in full screen but not in window mode

Have you enabled the AHCI (Bios) and installed the AHCI Driver ?

PS: Catlayst 10.12 crashed (Blue Screen) with fast Stand By (Save to Ram) , the 10.11 also.


LH Computer Center PC

 

[sekach]

AHCI was not installed, but after I installed it nothing changed. Thanks for the hint though.

The system is clean, I didn't have any codec packs installed except CoreAVC.
I just installed SAF 4.0 and tried all decoders (cyberlink, ffdshow, mpc), same effect.

There are lots messages like below in evr.log (attached)

03-01-2011 01:31:19.983 [8d4]Dropping frame, behind 48.63 ms, last sleep time 0.00 ms.
03-01-2011 01:31:19.983 [f68]Scheduling sample from the past (29.21 ms, last call to NotifyWorker: 7.14 ms)
03-01-2011 01:31:19.984 [8d4]Dropping frame, behind 29.63 ms, last sleep time 0.00 ms.
03-01-2011 01:31:19.989 [f68]Scheduling sample from the past (15.14 ms, last call to NotifyWorker: 5.48 ms)
03-01-2011 01:31:19.989 [8d4]Dropping frame, behind 15.36 ms, last sleep time 0.00 ms.


Any other ideas what can be the problem?
Thanks a lot. It's really frustrating, I started to think about buying a separate video card, but not sure it will help...

 

[sekach]

Answering my own question.
This is clear indication that integrated HD4200 video card doesn't have enough power to handle 1080i content. I was confused by the fact that WMP can render the same file fine, but it seems that MP uses some additional processing and therefore can't work smoothly on integrated video card.

I bought Radeon HD 5670 and the problem went away, there are no drops anymore.

I wish it could be more clear from MP requirements which card should be used.

5670 is slightly more than HTPC needs, but 5550 is somewhat minimum if you want to have smooth HD playback with video postprocessing.

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