Stuttering video on client - is HD my bottleneck? (1 Viewer)

[Peter Mee]

Hi

Have a singleseat installation on a server that manages TV server and acts as a client machine. This works great and provides smooth video up to HD on Live TV and stored files.

In another room I have a client machine based on this hardware (Asus C8HM70-I/HDMI Motherboard, On-Board Intel Celeron 847, Intel HM70, DDR3, S-ATA 600, Mini ITX, 2 x USB 3.0).

In this I have an (old) 2.5" SATA HD and it's connected to the server via GB LAN. Both machines run Windows 8 and MP 1.5

Watching content on the client machine, I find that after a few minutes, the video begins to stutter and break up. Pausing the video and restarting will fix it for a few minutes. Just as this breakup happens, I notice the HD activity LED start to blink a lot. Pausing causes this activity to cease.

So I'm guessing that maybe MP is filling memory and starting to use disk for spooling or caching or whatever and the HD is not up to speed. Would this be a fair assumption in this case?

Before plumping for a solid state drive, I'd like to get a better understanding of what might be going on here.

What's my best way of redirecting MP originated disk activity to another drive? If I could do that, I'd at least be able to identify or eliminate the 2.5" disk as the root cause before going through a full transfer of the OS to a new drive.

Thanks in advance

Peter

 

[Vasilich]

you haven't tell us how many RAM you've installed in your PC, and how many of it have you dedicated to graphic adapter (as it has no own memory).

 

[Lehmden]

Hi.
I've a Celeron 847 myself (MSI board) that I'm using as TV and MP2 Server, as NAS and for Downloads (jDownloader) all at the same time. And I also have an old 2.5" HDD as System Drive. In the beginning I've tested it as MP1 Client with good success on HD 1080i Live TV. So I don't believe it's your CPU/GPU that causes this. But I'm using Win7 which I believe fits better to low end hardware than Win 8.1. Just a guess as I really hate the "Modern UI" from Win8 and I will never use it. That's why I haven't tested this myself but normally older OS fits better to low end hardware than newer one.

It could be a memory/HDD speed issue but I don't think so as I mainly have the same setup which runs fine. Sounds more like some wired Windows services (defragmenting HDD in the middle of a recording is an usual use-case , Superfetch is another "nice buddy" to look after,...). It could be a network issue also.
I've tested my system as client with 2 GB of RAM in total and as much RAM as possible linked to GPU...

 

[Peter Mee]

you haven't tell us how many RAM you've installed in your PC, and how many of it have you dedicated to graphic adapter (as it has no own memory).

There is 4GB in the client machine.[DOUBLEPOST=1387213078][/DOUBLEPOST]

Hi.
I've a Celeron 847 myself (MSI board) that I'm using as TV and MP2 Server, as NAS and for Downloads (jDownloader) all at the same time. And I also have an old 2.5" HDD as System Drive. In the beginning I've tested it as MP1 Client with good success on HD 1080i Live TV. So I don't believe it's your CPU/GPU that causes this. But I'm using Win7 which I believe fits better to low end hardware than Win 8.1. Just a guess as I really hate the "Modern UI" from Win8 and I will never use it. That's why I haven't tested this myself but normally older OS fits better to low end hardware than newer one.

It could be a memory/HDD speed issue but I don't think so as I mainly have the same setup which runs fine. Sounds more like some wired Windows services (defragmenting HDD in the middle of a recording is an usual use-case , Superfetch is another "nice buddy" to look after,...). It could be a network issue also.
I've tested my system as client with 2 GB of RAM in total and as much RAM as possible linked to GPU...

Thanks for this. I'll try to monitor bandwidth, CPU and disk usage while running MP to see if I can spot any spikes in any of these. It just feels like a HD issue with the constant churning.

Peter

 

[Vasilich]

4GB is more than enough for things you want to do with the PC, so, as Lehmden said, try to start perfmon at that time when you have stutters, to check what is going on - either some other process takes HDD bandwidth, or there is antivirus active...

 

[Lehmden]

antivirus

Forgot about this as I never needed (nor used) any AV software since ages. OFC this can be the reason for stuttering.