Live TV and Recorded TV stuttering (1 Viewer)

[homer.web]

Hello,

I am experiencing strange problem with Live TV and Recorded TV playback.

I have ZOTAC ZBOX PI320 pico with Windows 8.1 With Bing setup as HTPC. All specs can be seen here: http://www.zotac.com/products/mini-...er/DESC/amount/10/section/specifications.html

I have installed Windows Media Pack, MP 1.9 with TV Server, LAV codecs. Everything seems fine, Music plays OK, Movie as well, but I have problems with TV streams. Live or Recorded. After several minutes (5-10 minutes) video starts stutter, but sound is OK. If I pause the stream for several seconds and play it again, the stream usually plays OK for next 5 minutes and that it starts again to stutter.

System resources showing very mild utilization of the system when playing the streams (30% CPU, 45% Memory, 1% HDD activity).
CPU utilization is on 30% with HW acceleration enabled, without it shows 60%. Even when stuttering the utilization does not change at all.

I was tweaking several settings with the filters, acceleration, I was changing TV Server process priority as well, but with no luck.

Than I have tried to install XBMC/KODI, configure it to use MP TV Server and try to play Live and Recorded TV. The results are very interesting. Both streams are played very well without any stutter, and what is more interesting the CPU utilization is on half of the utilization obtained by using MP (15%). Also the changing of the channels and playback start of the recorded TV is much faster with XMBC than with MP.

Any suggestions? Any help would be very appreciated.

I know the solution would be abandon MP and start using KODI, but I would rather stick to MP, which I like and prefer over the KODI.

Thanks in advance

 

[HTPCSourcer]

Any suggestions? Any help would be very appreciated.

Please provide full logs.

 

[homer.web]

Sorry, forgot to upload it...

 

[HTPCSourcer]

I am a little bit confused . The log appears to be recorded with XBMC, not the MediaPortal TVServer. I can also not see any stuttering, however, I don't want to browse through hundreds of lines either in search for it. May I suggest that you use MediaPortal software only, reproduce the problem and then indicate the time when you observed video/audio issues?

With respect to channel change speed: check out the Wiki for UNC paths here. Channel change will significantly increase using this setup.
Regarding CPU load: LAV leads to comparably high CPU usage. If you have the possibility give the Microsoft-DTV codecs a try, their CPU load is much lower than LAV.

 

[homer.web]

Hi, thank you for your reply. I have deleted all logs, and created just short logs with the stuttering occurrence around 16:03.
I have tried Microsoft-DTV codecs, but there is no difference in CPU load at all. Maybe I have missed something. But definitely CPU load is cut to half using XBMC playing the same Recorded TV files, which is really strange to me.

 

[homer.web]

Here is what I am talking about. You can see that around 25 sec. playback goes to normal by itself. Than cca 5 minutes OK, and again the video is choppy.

 

[HTPCSourcer]

Hi, thank you for your reply. I have deleted all logs, and created just short logs with the stuttering occurrence around 16:03.

Unfortunately logs were not collected in Debug mode. There is not enough infomation with standard logging. Can you redo it? Use the MePo Debug command from startmenu and let yourself be guided by the dialogue that appears. Reproduce your video stutter, then stop MediaPortal and close the program. Upload the automatically created zip file from the desktop.

I have tried Microsoft-DTV codecs, but there is no difference in CPU load at all.

This is surprising. On all systems I've seen MS-DTV was always yielding lower CPU loads than LAV.[DOUBLEPOST=1418058644][/DOUBLEPOST]

Here is what I am talking about. You can see that around 25 sec. playback goes to normal by itself. Than cca 5 minutes OK, and again the video is choppy.

Sorry, but all appears normal from here.But YouTube is not a good judgement.

 

[homer.web]

Here is what I am talking about. You can see that around 25 sec. playback goes to normal by itself. Than cca 5 minutes OK, and again the video is choppy.

Sorry, but all appears normal from here.But YouTube is not a good judgement.

Well you can clearly see, that from beginning til 25th sec. the video is choppy approximately every second. It freezes for a sec and than jumps forward. After that it plays flawlessly.

 

[HTPCSourcer]

You were talking about 5 min - for a 30s Clip. Anyway, I see what you mean. Now you seem to have multiple sessions playing in parallel. Something that I also observed in the log but thought it to be particular to your XMBC. Frankly, if you play 9 streams in parallel you should not expect to get smooth Video Play, this is just over-charging your processor and graphics unit.

So please reproduce your issue while playing just one stream in debug mode.

 

[homer.web]

I am definitely not playing 9 streams in paralel... I am not playing even two streams in paralel. I have 2 DVB-T cards, so I am able to play one stream and record two streams simultaneously at once. And I installed XMBC just today for testing and comparison purposes, but the problem is here from beginning - at least 2 weeks - since installation. It was completely clean OS installation with just MP install. Everything else is disabled, even antimalware and search services, which were consuming most of the resources.