Stuttering on LiveTV (2 Viewers)

[mckzoo]

Curing the flickering

If it's any help I originally ran MP on XP but also had high CPU loading when viewing HD channels. I was using a dual screen cpu card EN8500 that supports hardware acceleration, but under XP I couldn't get the H/W accelration to work. On channels like TV3 I was getting up to 90% CPU loading. Also the EN8500 had the annoying feature that on power up it would only show the pc bootup screen on the HDMI output, whereas I wanted it on the VGA output.

To solve the above I upgraded to an EN8600 card (solved the bootup issue but not really necessary for your issue)

The key thing to do is upgrade to Vista. This uses VMR rendering and allows the Hardware Acceleration on your Graphics card (provided it has this capability) to kick in and ofload all video processing from the CPU to the GPU.

The effect was Dramatic. CPU usage dropped from ~90% to ~ 7 % (maybe 10% peak).

Even with this I still had some screen flicker etc.

I then looked in the Nvidia utility and changed the Screen setting for the Sony Bravia TV from 1080i 50 Hz to 1080i.

Dropping the 50Hz setting made quite a difference and now I don't get any flickering at all. I think this allows the sony tv to do it's own adjustment for frame rate etc

hope this helps

mckzoo

 

[arsenal333]

Hello mckzoo,

I tried that option of Vista and hardware acceleration, I did notice a massive difference, certainly not a significant as you've mentioned in my case and eventually the CPU worked it's way back to stutter proportions after a while.

I've been using MP for a long time now - and never had this amount of stuttering or CPU utilisation until RC2, was just thinking that something has changed, some bug that hasn't really been defined yet. Certainly for a AMD 2000+ to be having this trouble on a single seat setup should not be the case.

 

[seco]

It seems that some kind of Stuttering FAQ could be usefull.

I've been fighting against stuttering with both Live TV and movies (.mkv's mostly) and in my experience lot of stuttering problems are drivers/codecs settings related.

I could create a new thread which would collect stuttering issues to first post and introduce possible fixes for the issues.

 

[charli181]

It seems that some kind of Stuttering FAQ could be usefull.

I've been fighting against stuttering with both Live TV and movies (.mkv's mostly) and in my experience lot of stuttering problems are drivers/codecs settings related.

I could create a new thread which would collect stuttering issues to first post and introduce possible fixes for the issues.

If you do that then we could look at adding it too the wiki as well.. I will help with that side if you want

 

[elconejito]

...snip

Installed RC2 last night and just did a quick test. Still there.

With TV Service at normal priority it was actually worse than before. Instead of once every 2 or 3 minutes before, it was now several times a minute.

With TVService at above normal priority it lessened considerably maybe once every 3 or 4 minutes, but it was still there. High priority didn't have much additional influence.

On a whim I disabled antivirus and firewall (AVG and Comodo respectively), had no affect either.

These messages come up in the mediaportal.log file a LOT. With corresponding entries in the tsreader.log. Seems to be bouncing around different streamtypes and resolutions. Does anyone else get these?:

2008-07-21 22:10:38.765625 [Info.][3]: TsReaderPlayer: OnVideoFormatChanged - streamtype=H264 resolution=192x176 aspect ratio=16:9 bitrate=15000000 isInterlaced=False
2008-07-21 22:10:39.031250 [Info.][3]: TsReaderPlayer: OnVideoFormatChanged - streamtype=MPEG2 resolution=720x480 aspect ratio=4:3 bitrate=6000000 isInterlaced=False
...snip

They seem to be around entries for the Video Convertor plugin, I'm going to try disabling that and see if it makes a difference.

Logs attached...

I removed the Video Convertor last week and it made no difference. I still see these "OnVideoFormatChanged" entries. I was going to try the latest SVN, but seems like there were lots of DB issues (which were later patched) so I shied away from it for the time being. Overall, I think RC2 is worse than RC1 in regards to this issue (better overall though) which I may have to go back to.

Is there anything that I can try on this end to produce better/more informative logs? I'm willing to try just about anything...

 

[Rudi99]

I'm willing to try just about anything...

Yeah, donate 500 $ and u will get the solution via patch by pm ... ;-))

I don't think it's the cpu-load or hdd-access (see my sys-specs, that should really be fast enough). I tried different codecs / packs (kl-codec, ffdshow4, ffdshow5, manually no third party codecs): no solution. I wonder, if there is any of the programmers is concerned about this stuttering and just searching a solution - hallooooo - anybody out there?

 

[romadd64]

I am recording in mpg. Could this be an issue?

Did not know you could still, as this has not worked for me for months and i believed was totally broken, so the advice i have been giving out is to use ts format.

I turned it off as I could not watch it them in MP it did record. I am having Codec Hell at the moment since ffdshow has been disallowed for MPEG2 streams.......and I can not get any others to work well.

My Stutters seem to be noise in the signal, (i.e. mainly electrical appliances turning on off) but this "new feature" of dropping packets has made it quite more noticable.

I have compiled a modified version of TsReader.ax for Revision 19778 (last RC2 SVN at now), that should limit stuttering in favour of pixelation.
Just replace the file in Mediaportal folder with this version.

romadd

 

[csandml]

Hi

Has anybody been able to test romadd64's tsreader file?

I have had this issue as well but am stuck back on the last smooth RC1 ( for me SVN19228) without the time to upgrade to RC2 knowing that i will probable also need to find the time to go back to RC1 19228 if i still have the stutter. All subsequent builds of RC1 weren't usable for me.

I too never had any issue with crashing because of the dirty signal so would ideally like to be able to somehow remove that fix from the current release if it is causing our problems?

Regards
csandml

 

[Rudi99]

still testing his tsreader.ax, i'll be back... if not, i also must go back to 19228, that's the last working svn for me too.

 

[elconejito]

I haven't been home for a few days, won't get a chance to try it till probably thursday or friday. I don't think I've tried that SVN csandml & Rudi99, I'll try that if this fix doesn't do it. I really need a a stable version