Stuttering on some channels (1 Viewer)

[fishman2020]

Hi folks,

I am new to MediaPortal. I just built a new computer and decided to put Windows 10 on it. A friend of mine gave me his InfiniTV 4 card to use in this new machine as he upgraded to the 6 a while back. As you know Windows 10 has no WMC capabilities. I knew this going in and I knew that there were some other options out there for this card and os combo... and honestly, I've never been a huge fan of WMC. I had an XP media center about 12 years ago that was meh. It served it's purpose but I never felt like it was as good as it could have been... anyway... onto my issue...

I was able to install MediaPortal and set it up w/ my card in a pretty quick time frame. I found all of the channels and used the DirectSchedule plugin to import the EPG and have had no huge problems thus far. Minor fixable things here and there after some trial and error.

The one thing I'm noticing is my HDTV channels and SD cable channels come in excellent with little to no issues. However, channels that are considered OTA or channels I could pull in w/ the Clear QAM tuner on my TV seem to stutter to the point where it is unwatchable. I wouldn't take issue with this if these were channels I didn't care about but I really want to record from some of the effected channels like MeTV and Antenna TV.

Any suggestions would be extremely welcome and helpful. Thanks!

System Specs:
CPU - i7-4790k
RAM - 8 GB
GPU - EVGA Nvidia GTX 760
120 GB Samsung EVO SSD for OS
WD 1 TB for other stuff... have my recordings and all MediaPortal folders set to this drive.

 

[mm1352000]

Hello and welcome!

Any suggestions would be extremely welcome and helpful.

Please could you follow our support procedure and attach log files. The log files will [hopefully] give us the detail we need in order to help you.

http://wiki.team-mediaportal.com/1_MEDIAPORTAL_1/16_Support/3_Forums/2_Log_Files

Use the watchdog tool with option 1 to start MediaPortal.
Go to the TV section.
Start TV on a channel that you don't have problems with.
View for ~30 seconds.
Change to a channel that you do have problems with.
View for ~30 seconds.
Close MP.
The watchdog tool should now produce a tidy zip file that you can upload/attach for us ("upload a file").

Don't hesitate to ask if any of the above is not clear.

mm

 

[fishman2020]

Thanks for the very fast reply. I've attached my logs.

 

[mm1352000]

Great, thanks.
I see what you mean.
The TsWriter log is full of continuity errors. In simple terms, this usually means one of 2 things:

1. Inadequate signal strength/quality.
2. Overloaded hard drive/disk.

You can check the signal strength/quality on the tuner's web page thing. Strength should be -15 dB absolute minimum; quality, I'm not so sure... maybe ~30 dB.

Regarding the hard drive: if you run security software (eg. anti-virus, anti-spyware - Norton, Windows Defender, Microsoft Security Essentials, AVG etc.), please ensure that you configure it to trust MediaPortal and MediaPortal's TV Server (TvService.exe). Exclude your timeshifting and recording folders from scans.

 

[DragonQ]

As well as excluding your recording/timeshifting drive from anti-malware scanners, I'd recommend a defrag with free space optimisation. I've now set up such a defrag to run every night and it seems to have cleared stuttering issues I was getting whereby I could record multiple HD streams without issues but couldn't watch one whilst it was recording.

 

[fishman2020]

Thanks for the guys. I am out of town until Sunday so I will try these things when I get back and report my results. Much appreciated!