New to gbpvr and have a question about performance.
Here is what I have,
ATI TVWonder HD650 - This is working very well.
NVidia 7600 GT video card (PCI Express).
AMD Athalon x64 dual core 4200+ processor
SATA drives for both OS and the PVR buffers.
I am using pvrx2.
Video Decoder - ATI MPEG Video Decoder
Video Renderer - VMR9 Custom
I have been able to record a standard def channel while watching a previous recording of a standard def channel with no jitter or skipping. My trouble starts with HD channels. If I record a hd program I can not play it while recording another one.
While recording a standard def channel my cpu usage is about 2% for the gbpvr service. While watching a standard def recording and recording another standard def feed it is about the same with total system usage at about 18%.
I can record HD with no trouble. What should I do about the replay performance? Is there a better video card choice or decoder choice?
I really want this to work so I can give the cable company the boot....
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Brian
The stutter might be from if you have the TV buffer the same partition, or even hard drive maybe, that the show you're watching is playing from, especially if it hasn't been defragmented in awhile. Not sure from your mention of two drives if all of that is separate. Might also be from if you have commercial skip running. That can use some hard drive.
7600GT is a good HTPC card, so it's not that.
I agree with Deusxmachina. Your system specs should be quite sufficient. I was able to do record and watch HD programs simultaneously on a single core 3600+ with a 7600GS. I even did it with Live TV and Recording on the same drive. I had to defrag quite often though. I was not running any commercial skip though. I used a different tuner but that should be irrelevant.
Thanks for the reply(s).
I have 5 physical drives in my system.
The one that GBPVr is installed on is the main OS drive.
I have all the other stuff buffering, recording going to another drive. From what I read above I should put the recordings on one physical drive and the buffers on another physical drive. I will try that today.
I did get Powervideo for my card, so now when I am recording and watching the cpu utilization is pretty low but I still get a stutter or two.
I will check the comercial skip, I dont think i set that up but maybe it got turned on by default or something.
In the config it has a Hardware decoder device. I thought that the 7 series of video cards from Nvidia had a hardware decoder. Is this true or is it just the Powervideo drivers?
Thanks
Brian
bdejong Wrote:In the config it has a Hardware decoder device. I thought that the 7 series of video cards from Nvidia had a hardware decoder. Is this true or is it just the Powervideo drivers?
Brian
Is this in the GBPVR-config? If so than it doesn't apply to your videocard but to certain tuner-cards with a hardware decoder chip on it. e.g. the Hauppauge 350.
Ok,
Moved the live buffer and recordings to separate drives. Appears to have made a difference. I was able tor record a channel, and then once that was done record another program while watching the previous recording with no skipping. I will try it again to make sure.
Here is what I have for settings.
Software MPEG-2 Playback
Video Decoder - NVIDIA Video Decoder
Audio Decoder - NVIDIA Audio Decoder
Audio Renderer - DirectSound: Realtek HD Audio
PVRX2.exe Video Renderer
VMR9 Custom
No processing options selected on the Processing tab.
We will see how it goes, thanks for all the suggestions..
Brian
ahhh,try fse mode and you'l notice much smoother...
but yea, i'm having problems with comskip too...it's having too hard a time reading the HD stuff and bogs the rest of the system down...
so i made a batch file to exclude the hd channels from comskip..
works great...
problem is when watching [almost 50% cpu] and comskipping hd [about 50%]
and even tho it's set to 'play nice' with other processes, it doesn't leave anything left for the rest of the system...leading to stutters..
and yes, all those processes are accessing diff. files at same time, clogging up the drive bandwidth....which i believe is the real culprit...
What I understood from Erik (comskip) it's not so much the cpu that is "overasked" by comskip but it's the disks that give the trouble.
Hans
From the tuning manual
Quote:Reducing the CPU load
Comskip runs on âIdleâ priority allowing other programs to execute normally. The Disk IO by Comskip can be rather high so it may be useful to reduce the throttle the execution speed of Comskip. The main parameters for this with their default values are
play_nice_sleep=10
play_nice_start=-1
play_nice_end=-1
The value of play_nice_sleep is the number of milliseconds Comskip will suspend execution after each frame processed. This will be done starting from play_nice_start till play_nice_end, both in 24 hour time format. From 7 in the morning till eleven in the evening will be
play_nice_start=700
play_nice_end=2300