SkyStar2 DVB on 690g drops frames (1 Viewer)

[qventin]

Hi All,

I have been trying to run SkyStar2 on both XP and Win7, old and freshly installed, all DVB-fixes and virtually all possible BIOS settings. Still I cannot make it run properly -- every 5 to 10 seconds the picture freezes for half a second. The issue is persistent on both the master server preview mode and on all external frontends I have set.

After a while I figured out it has nothing to do with codecs: first, changing 'em does not help and secondly - on a freshly installed system with only the card driver and a proper MP installation (all latest versions took part in experiment) it's all the same.

Now the card has been screwed into all pci-slots, all other cards tried in various combinations and finally gone (as being suspected for occupying PCI bandwith), all possible motherboard devices switched off -- damn it freezes!

The system is MSI K9AG Neo2-Digital (AMD690G chip, no external video), Athlon 64 X2 5200+, 2Gb RAM 800 Dual, currently on WinXP32.

And another important notice -- on low-bitrate transponders it works fine, but when it comes to usual 27500 the trouble begins. I guess it has got something to do with the PCI bandwith, but why this card worked fine 10yrs ago on an obsolete 500MHz Celeron? And it still surprisingly well works in ProgDVB..

Dear MediaPortal fellows, please tell me, what else to try and do with the system?

PS Yep, Sysinternals and DPC Latency Checker did not help clear the mystery..

 

[cahaag]

Hi qventin,

you are not alone.
I have a similar setup (MSI K9AG Neo2-Digital (AMD690G chip, Nvidia Gforce 9800 GTX), Athlon 64 X2 4800+, 2Gb RAM 800 Dual) and I have the same issue.
In addition to the problems with the picture freezers, I am not able to play music files without distortion. I used the DPC Latency Checker and found out that the Skystar driver produces a latency of more than 500 ms in an interval of 0.2 ms.
As soon as I disable the Skystar network device the latency goes down to 0.1 ms and below.
The issue must have something to do with the mainboard chipset, because in my sons system it is working fine (AMD 790X chipset). Would be interesting if anyone else has the same issue ...

 

[qventin]

Hi Cahaag!

You somewhat relieved me of my pain being alone stuck with this p-prob-blem

I got two pieces of news for you:
- first, I had the same issue with sound stuttering, it's solved by tuning SkyStar to any channel. You can just set "Setup4PC" software to lock on any transponder by default (just create a profile in it) -- sound will start playing just fine. (I had to buy a Cretive sound card to figure it won't help)))
- second, I tried SS2 on my primary computer with Intel G-somethin chipset, Q9300, NVidia, RAID stripe and 4Gb RAM which, well, I cannot suspect for being slow at all -- same story, it damn freezes. AND ProgDVB works just fine again. So I assume it has something to do with the way MediaPortal handles SkyStar2.

Should we report a bug?

There could also be an option of installing XP with SP2 and trying previous version of drivers (won't work with SP3, says upgrade to SP2, haha) hoping it might work.. Pity I ain't got no time for that now... I guess SS2 will reside in my primary PC and for the server I gotta go buy something with HD support. Haha, if it will stutter too.