HDTV stuttering unless some SD played first (1 Viewer)

[PMUXY]

Hello,
I have been playing for few weeks now with MP1 and this issue is currently the sole annoying remaining one.
All is in the title.
Live and recorded HD TV is stuttering, until or unless I select a SD channel or play a small recorded SD chunk.
I have disabled automatic refresh,format changer... Changed the HD codecs to M$ ones. Before that, the video was more a slideshow, and/or was stalling sometimes while changing the format.
Now the video is clean when I somewhat initialize the thing with some SD content first:
Now that I changed my TV frequency to 50Hz, there is no drop at all anymore when I apply this trick. And there is plenty of marging for the M$ decoder.

My system:
Acer revo 3700: D525 @ 1.8GHz 4GB of ram, NVidia Ion2, Win 7.

I never encountered this issue with WMC. So this system is enough for HDTV.

Would be nice if someboy could give me some hint to fix this small issue.

 

[mm1352000]

Hello and welcome!

Thanks for posting the log files - that's really helpful.

I never encountered this issue with WMC. So this system is enough for HDTV.

I accept your statement. However, in general MP has higher GPU overhead/requirements than WMC. Therefore there are and have been cases with hardware similar to yours where people have found they needed a more powerful GPU or CPU to run MediaPortal. I'm not saying that is the case for you at this stage. Just pointing out that the fact that WMC worked fine with that hardware is not a guarantee that MediaPortal will be able to do the same.

Live and recorded HD TV is stuttering, until or unless I select a SD channel or play a small recorded SD chunk.

Hmmm, the log files are telling a different story. I see that you view HD, SD and finally HD again, and I can see problems both times you view the HD channel. There are records of dropped frames and late samples in the EVR renderer and late video data in TsReader. I also notice that TV Server is running very slow. Have you checked the system performance (Windows task manager etc.) while using MediaPortal?

I have disabled automatic refresh,format changer...
Now that I changed my TV frequency to 50Hz, there is no drop at all anymore when I apply this trick.

The purpose of the automatic refresh rate handling is to match the frequency of the content and TV automatically. So, my recommendation is to enable it and check the configuration. You shouldn't have to manually change the TV frequency.

Changed the HD codecs to M$ ones. Before that, the video was more a slideshow, and/or was stalling sometimes while changing the format.

I guess that hardware accelerated video decoding was not active for whatever codec you were previously using.

Regards,
mm

 

[PMUXY]

Thanks for your answer.

About the log files, I tried to log the issue. HD before and after SD. Maybe I was too fast for the "after" part ?
I Included 3 screenshots.
You can see that, for the "clean" screenshots, there were a lot of frame drops at the beginning of the display, but none anymore after a while, when the screenshot is done (red curve).
Of course, the tiny CPU is significantly loaded, but it looks like there is still some margin.

I guess the automatic refresh rate is of little use for my TV, as before I manually created the 50Hz setting, it was reporting 60Hz 1280x768 32 bits, only.
As I use this HTPC to watch live or recorded TV, the video is always 50Hz anyway.
Before I changed the TV frequency, there was a drop in the frame rate (red line) regularly. Not noticeable on the TV, anyway.

Regards

 

[mm1352000]

About the log files, I tried to log the issue. HD before and after SD. Maybe I was too fast for the "after" part ?

No, not too fast.

As I said previously, I do see that frames are dropped etc. for the first HD channel... but I also see some of the same for the second HD channel too. Maybe what I am seeing for the second HD channel are the "lot of frame drops at the beginning of the display" that you mentioned.

Hmmm, honestly I find the problem/situation to be quite unusual. It's the first time I've ever "seen" anything like it. The HD problem ... and also that TV Server is running much slower than expected. Even with a 1.8 GHz CPU and 5400 rpm HDD I would have expected better performance. This makes me think something is not right...

Does the video frame dropping problem ever happen with HD recordings?
What happens if you skip back or pause briefly?
Do you use any security software (anti-virus, anti-spyware etc.)?
Can you please check the HDD load/performance in task manager -> performance -> resource monitor?

Of course, the tiny CPU is significantly loaded, but it looks like there is still some margin.

Yes, looks like there is plenty of margin for the CPU.
What about the HDD and GPU?

As I use this HTPC to watch live or recorded TV, the video is always 50Hz anyway.

Okay.

Before I changed the TV frequency, there was a drop in the frame rate (red line) regularly. Not noticeable on the TV, anyway.

Interesting! I wonder if that was due to the mismatch between content and TV (ie. 50 Hz content not equal to 60 Hz TV) or the GPU is struggling. Maybe 60 Hz was too much but 50 Hz is ~90% GPU capacity...?

Regards,
mm

 

[PMUXY]

The HDD load is around 12% whatever is the playback (smooth or stuttering).
The issue happens with recorded TV as well. With the same workaround: play few seconds of recorded SD TV.
Pause or navigation in the video does nothing.

I don't know how to monitor the GPU during the test. However according to MePo, the render time is 13.7ms for a display at 20ms. So I guess it should be sufficient.

Regards

 

[PMUXY]

Hello,
It has been a while since I tried to fix this issue. With no luck.
Now, I upgraded for fun my HTPC to Windows 10, along with MP1.12.0 : a clean install, keeping nothing from previous win7.
New Windows, new MP1, new NVidia graphic driver...
Still the same issue.
Note that I tested "Windows media player", new "Movie and TV" application and MPC-HC. They are all able to display 1080i H264 videos flawlessly on this PC.
Only MediaPortal has this init glitch.

I had another small issue, luckily fixed in few minutes : the "mute" key was not working anymore with MP 1.12.0.
If not already fixed somewhere else in this forum, here is the reason =>
Windows 10 was muting the sound, and it was unmuted immediately by MP1.
I just disabled this key in MP1 configuration to have it work correctly.

Regards