Jumpy DVD playback apparently caused by TV server? (1 Viewer)

[jerrbe]

I recently setup a HTPC in my livingoom. This is a clean windows install and a clean install of MediaPortal RC4. The PC is an Athlon 64 3000 with 2GB of RAM. I have a hauppage tv tuner and both media portal client and tv server are running on this box.

Whenever I playback a DVD the audio is fine but the video occasionally (every couple minutes) jumps. I searched the forums looking for potential answers and nothing I found seemed to help. I finally resorted to using windows media player to playback the DVD and I had the exact same problems. My next thought was that my DVD drive was having issues. I ripped the movie to the hard drive and played it back from disk with the exact same results. About the same time I also noticed the jumpy video when watching tv programs I had previously recorded with Mediaportal.

Finally I opened task manager while playing back the DVD. My CPU burden was around 10% while the movie is playing, but each time I had a jump in the video I also had a spike in CPU burden. I started watching the specific processes that jumped in CPU usage at is was always the TVServer service and the MYSQL service. Once making that discovery I stopped the TV service and now DVD playback is smooth and CPU burden stays around 10% the whole time.

Manually stopping the TV service each time I want to watch a DVD is NOT a practical solution. Does anyone have any ideas on why the TV service would be causing video playback to jump? Can you think of any settings I might change to make this problem go away, or is a dual-core CPU a requirement for smooth video playback?

Thanks

 

[tourettes]

Does tv server logs show any activity for the CPU spikes?

 

[jerrbe]

I did not find anything useful in the TV Server log that appeared to correlate to the spikes in CPU burden. I have attached a copy of the log and a jpeg of what the CPU burden is doing. After watching this a little closer, the TV service never gets above 5% CPU burden. It is the MYSQL service that is burdening the CPU.

MYSQL is very periodic in its CPU burden it jumps to approx 25% every 20 to 30 seconds and then jumps to 100% burden every couple minutes. All of that CPU burden goes away when I disable the TVserver because that is the only thing I am using Mysql for at the moment.

I started playing with the TV server, disabling plugins, etc to see if anything made the periodic burden go away. The change that made a difference was scheduled recordings. As soon as I deleted all scheduled recordings this issue went away. When I add them back the periodic burden comes back.

After a little more digging on the internet I found a way to make the MYSQL service run at a lower priority. This was not as easy as it should have been. I had to download a freeware utility for changing the priority of mysql from Command Line Process Viewer/Killer/Suspender for Windows NT/2000/XP and then create a batch script that runs at log-on to adjust the priority every time my computer boots. The batch script looked like this:

net start mysql
process -p mysqld low

The net start command was required to ensure the service started before the scheduled task ran. Changing the priority seems to have solved the jumpy video playback at least for the moment. I wonder what would happen if I switched back to the microsoft SQL server instead of using Mysql??

If anyone has an explanation for exactly why this was happening I would love to hear it...

 

[tourettes]

If anyone has an explanation for exactly why this was happening I would love to hear it...

Me too

How many schedules do you have?

 

[Zagreus]

SQL Server won't necessarily solve the problem. I've got a PC running RC4 on a machine with an AMD 3500+ and 2GB ram, and I'm getting the processor spikes too, but this is constant, not every few minutes.

I took out all scheduled recordings and the spiking wasn't nearly as bad. The spiking doesn't happen straight away, it takes a few minutes for this to occur.

Attached are my logs and an image of the spiking happening in task manager.

 

[jerrbe]

Originally I had 5 scheduled recordings, all series, but when I was testing the problem returned with a single scheduled recording.

I also realized my attachments did not work last time. Here is another attempt at attaching the log and the screenshot of task manager.