Stuttering on LiveTV (6 Viewers)

[Trouty]

I too have had issue with stuttering TV, mostly when recoording. I have been through so many of these posts over and over again. Changing settings, codecs, tsreader, and pretty much trying anything that I could find, including the wireless NIC. The CPU and Ram usage was good. There was also continuity errors in the TS logs. I have 2 ide drives. the second drive, I use for timeshifting, and recording. Today, at my wits end, and frustrated by my wife complaining (Couchman75 - I hear you!!) that when we try and record, the tv stutters, and freezes. So I changed the recording folder to My Documents on the IDE 1(OS drive - XP proSp3), and left the timeshfting on IDE2 Bingo - RECORDS AND PLAYS PERFECT!. So then I swapped it, around to timeshift on IDE 1, and Record to IDE 2. Straight back to Stuttering, whiging, and swearing. I have no idea why this, but man i'm happy!!

PS: Thanks guys for all of your awesome work. I have been using MP for a couple of years now - Love it. RC3 is fantastic. Cant wait for the first SVN. Worth all the whinging just to be able to watch MP grow.

 

[Redth]

Well I have some news to report...

I was also experiencing stuttering live tv (haven't really tested recordings much, as I don't really use them) and getting lots of continuity errors in my tswriter.log file. This was translating into dropped frames by tsreader, and after I used the altered filter to keep dropped frames, I saw the pixelations and video distortions instead of just a stutter as the frames weren't being dropped.

I have a 3x500gb raid 5 array, which I've partitioned to approximately 40gb for windows/software and 950gb for storing movies, etc... I had early on decided to move my timeshift and recording folders onto my second partition. When I saw your post Trouty, I decided to give it a try even though I'm not really dealing with different IDE channels. I don't know of a technical reason why one partition would slow down tswriter on my setup as they both reside on the same drives :s... But, I tried it anyways.

Low and behold I've been watching live HD tv for about 20 minutes now without a single continuity error or stutter. In the same time span, I probably would have had 100 continuity errors before moving the timeshift folder back. Again, I can't really explain it (unless the partitions need a defrag, which is entirely possible), but it's working fine now.

Hopefully this helps someone else out! I'm glad I read your post Trouty. I had given it a thought but you convinced me to try it

 

[mts]

since I use this streamingserver: https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/270017-post7.html
I had no stutterings anymore! In no situation

 

[Redth]

Ok, another update... It was running great with timeshift back on my c: drive yesterday. Today, a different story. Now, I did have some torrents going originally which might have been sucking up some write speed, but even after stopping them I was still getting some stuttering and continuity errors.

I have 4gb ram on my machine so I decided to make 1gb RAMdisk. I've moved my timeshift buffer to my ramdisk (I set 3-7 files at 128mb each), and so far it's running flawlessly again.

So, it's quite apparent to me that the problem lies in the process of tswriter getting data sent to the disk fast enough for tsreader to read it back out... Now I've heard of issues with sata controllers interfering with dvb-s cards and other weird things. Perhaps this is the case for me. If it is, I'm not sure what I can do about it besides continuing to use my ramdisk (although of course this won't help if I ever use recordings).

Any ideas?

 

[jaymode]

Ambass:

The new TsReader.ax works great for me. With the old I have stuttering of the video (not audio) and with this it plays smoothly. This is on ATSC QAM content from my Cable Company.

 

[RickDeckard]

Another vote here for the tsreader posted by Ambass.

Instead of the audio/video stutter with the standard tsreader I now see only the occasional mild video corruption and most importantly, NO skipping of audio - which was a huge pain.

Can this fix be included in svn so it gets rolled out with future revisions of the TS reader?

 

[tourettes]

Another vote here for the tsreader posted by Ambass.

Instead of the audio/video stutter with the standard tsreader I now see only the occasional mild video corruption and most importantly, NO skipping of audio - which was a huge pain.

Can this fix be included in svn so it gets rolled out with future revisions of the TS reader?

after 20496 SVN version its possible to use the experimental C:\RelaxTsReaderForBadReception.txt setting.

 

[Ambass]

I suspect removing the frame dropping causes a slow lost of synchro between audio and video because discontinuities are not passed to the codec.

I can't confirm because I've quite never discontinuities...

ambass.

 

[tourettes]

I suspect removing the frame dropping causes a slow lost of synchro between audio and video because discontinuities are not passed to the codec.

I can't confirm because I've quite never discontinuities...

Thats why its called experimental It's possible that some codecs handle the issue nicely, but who knows if there will be some drifting.

 

[Redth]

Just to put a conclusion for anyone who might care and be following my troubles ...

I narrowed it down to poor performance writing/reading to my raid5 array... I've got it to speed up since by changing a few settings (not sure i'm 100% happy with the speed still, but it may be good enough), and will try putting my timeshift back onto the drive today, since 1gb ramdisk doesn't get you much timeshift buffer with HD streams...